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

I run a mature software company that is being driven for profit (we are out of the fantastic future phase and solidly in the “make money” phase). Even with all the pressure to cut costs and increase automation, the most valuable use of LLMs is to make the software developers work more effectively, producing the feature improvements that customers want so that we can ensure customers will renew and upgrade. And to the extent that we are cutting costs, we are using AI to help us write code that lets us use infrastructure more efficiently (because infrastructure is the bulk of our costs).

But this is a software company. I think out in the “real world,” there are some low hanging fruit wins where AI replaces extremely routine boilerplate jobs that never required a lot of human intelligence in the first place. But even then, I’d say that the general drift is that the humans who were doing those low-level jobs have a chance to step up into jobs requiring higher-level intelligence where humans have a chance to really shine. And companies are competing not by just getting rid of salaries, but by providing much better service by being able to afford to have more higher-tier people on the payroll. And by higher-tier, I don’t necessarily mean more expensive. It can be the same people that were doing the low-level jobs; they just now can spend their human-level intelligence doing more interesting and challenging work.

So basically compressing the pay scale even further …

Well, many people complain about pay inequality. Compressing scales is the opposite of that, so should be welcomed?

Most of those people aren’t working in highly-paid disciplines like high tech. Generally those disciplines necessarily have wider spreads. I am perfectly fine with this.

If I suddenly have to think really hard at my job all day and do terribly if I’m undersea and still get paid the same or less, I will be left pretty bitter.

Wouldn't AI mean you have to think less hard than before?

No, solving problems yourself is easier than understanding solutions that AI serves to you