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Entry-level jobs down by a third since launch of ChatGPT

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120 points lsharkey602 | 1 comments | 30 Jun 25 11:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.283s | source
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reedf1 ◴[30 Jun 25 13:47 UTC] No.44423223[source]▶
I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument, imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. When the demand eventually catches up (if it exists), the hiring will begin again.
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TSiege ◴[30 Jun 25 14:04 UTC] No.44423440[source]▶
I am not asking this as a gotcha, but a genuine curiosity for you or other people who find AI is helping them in terms of multiples. What is your workflow like? Where do you lean on AI vs not? Is it agentic stuff is tab by cursor?

I find AI helpful but no where near a multiplier in my day to day development experience. Converting a csv to json or vis-versa great, but AI writing code for me has been less helpful. Beyond boiler plate, it introduces subtle bugs that are a pain in the ass to deal with. For complicated things, it struggles and does too much and because I didn't write it I don't know where the bad spots are. And AI code review often gets hung up on nits and misses real mistakes.

So what are you doing and what are the resources you'd recommend?

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1. fcatalan ◴[30 Jun 25 15:02 UTC] No.44424208[source]▶
I use it a lot for reducing friction. When I procrastinate about starting something I ask the AI to come up with a quick plan. Maybe I'll just follow the first step, but it gets me going.

Sometimes I´ll even go a bit crazy on this planning thing and do things a bit similar to what this guy shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY4sFxLmMvw I tend to steer the process more myself, but typing whatever vague ideas are in my mind and ending up in minutes with a milestone and ticket list is very enabling, even if it isn´t perfect.

I also do more "drive by" small improvements:

- Annoying things that weren't important enough for a side quest writing a shell script, now have a shell script or an ansible playbook.

- That ugly CSS in an internal tool untouched for 5 years? fixed in 1 minute.

- The small prototype put into production with 0 documentation years ago? I ask an agentic tool to provide a basic readme and then edit it a bit so it doesn´t lie, well worth 15 minutes.

I also give it a first shot at finding the cause of bugs/problems. Most of the time it doesn't work, but in the last week it found right away the cause of some long standing subtle problems we had in a couple places.

I have also had sometimes luck providing it with single functions or modules that work but need some improvement (make this more DRY, improve error handling, log this or that...) Here I´m very conservative with the results because as you said it can be dangerous.

So am I more productive? I guess so, I don't think 4x or even 2x, I don't think projects are getting done much faster overall, but stuff that wouldn't have been done otherwise is being done.

What usually falls flat is trying to go on a more "vibe-coding" route. I have tried to come up with a couple small internal tools and things like that, and after promising starts, the agents just can't deal with the complexity without needing so much help that I'd just go faster by myself.