Many Gen Z employees say ChatGPT is giving better career advice than their bosses::Nearly half of Gen Z workers say they get better job advice from ChatGPT than their managers, according to a recent survey.
I have never, ever asked my boss, or chat gpt, about career advice. :)
me too
Asking ChatGPT for advice about anything is generally a bad idea, even though it might feel like a good idea at the time. ChatGPT responds with what it thinks you want to hear, just phrased in a way that sounds like actual advice. And especially since ChatGPT only knows as much information as you are willing to tell it, its input data is often biased. It’s like an r/relationshipadvice or r/AITA thread, but on steroids.
You think it’s good advice because it’s what you wanted to do to begin with, and it’s phrased in a way that makes your decision seem like the wise choice. Really, though, sometimes you just need to hear the ugly truth that you’re making a bad choice, and that’s not something that ChatGPT is able to do.
Anyways, I’m not saying that bosses are good at giving advice, but I think ChatGPT is definitely not better at giving advice than bosses are.
I’m not touting the merits of “prompt engineering” but this is a classical case.
Don’t ask “how can I be a more attractive employee” ask “I am a manager at a <thing> company. Describe features and actions of a better candidate/ employee.”
You will get very different answers
For these kind of generic questions, ChatGPT is great at giving you the common fluff you’d find in a random “10 ways to improve your career” youtube video.
Which may still be useful advice, but you can probably already guess what it’s going to say before hitting enter.
Nonsense. Not “about anything”. ChatGPT gives correct advice in many fields, some of which are directly verifiable - for example programming.
Well, yes, but lets get real here… Asking your boss about career advice is very often worse.
You are better with useless random information collected on the internet than what has been finely tailored against you.
Don’t forget well-meaning advice from someone incompetent who failed upwards but still lacks the self-awareness to see it. I’ve had a few of those.
It’s great for brainstorming and getting started on a problem, but you need to keep what you said in mind the whole time and verify its output. I’ve found it really good for troubleshooting. It’s wrong a lot of the time but it does lead you in the right direction which is very helpful for problems where it’s hard to know where to even start.
Haha chat gpt is really just the memory parasites from Rick and Morty.
How would ChatGPT know what I want to hear?
Because of the way you phrase it.
You only tell chatGPT your side of the story. And chatGPT is just a word predictor. If you offer it 2 options, and for one of them you use words that are on average 20.69% more positive to describe the option than the other one, chatGPT just fills the blanks and will see that that option is more positive, therefore it will probably recommend that.
ChatGPT has no intelligence or reason, it’s just a word predictor. It doesn’t use logic. It won’t do an analysis of the impact of each alternative, it just has some inputs and is asked to predict what the next word will be.
Yeah noticed this when I started to make chatgpt write more sentences in essay’s I was doing. When you make chatgpt write the next sentence in a paragraph 9/10 times it just rewrites what you wrote in a different way.
This is why it drives me insane that people call it AI
We’re just word predictors too.
Ask like an engineer, it will answer like an engineer. Ask like a moron, it will answer like a moron – all that is inherent in the training data, in the question/answer pairs the thing was trained on. Ask it to impersonate a Vulkan, it will get better at maths: My armchair analysis of that is that Vulkans talk quite formally and thus you’re getting more from the engineer and less from the moron training set.
I actually saw an article on researchers that found it answers better if you ask it to answer like it was in star Trek
Which definitely can’t be the case because Star Trek technobabble makes sense is what I’m saying, but the language mirrors that of what you see on an engineer forum so the increased accuracy smears over.
Somewhat relatedly if you want to talk about real-world warp engines (there’s some physicists with some ideas or maybe better put speculations) it’s probably going to start talking in StarTrek technobabble. Less “turn it off and on again”, more “reinitialise the primary power coupling”.
Man, shut the fuck up. I bet you say wikipedia and Google aren’t reliable either. Just use some damn sense.
I mean google search kinda famously sucks these days bc it’s been SEO’d and ad-promoted to death
Right, but if you have enough knowledge to search for what you’re looking for, then you should have enough sense to know if a site is bullshit or not. People trust sites like stack overflow all the time.
Well, yea, if you ask some giant tobacco company and ChatGPT if you should take up smoking you can guess who gives the better answer. ChatGPT makes up a lot of shit but it’s not as self interested as the vast majority of bosses.
Unsurprising. Managers have their own goals in mind and how you fit into them. They don’t care so much about where you end up, but what you can help them with.
ChatGPT just wants to be loved.
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On the other hand, one of mine thinks she deserves a promotion because her electricity bill was so much higher in winter than she was expecting.
Maybe what she needs help with from ChatGPT is translating her actual request to language you’d better understand.
“Hi person who has undue influence over my well-being, it turns out that the increased amount of work I’ve been doing at home has led to an unexpected increase in incurred personal costs. Ideally, these should be offset by work. Given I am skeptical you’d authorize any kind of reimbursement or a relative pay raise to cover these costs for their own sake, I’m instead coming to you to suggest a promotion prompted by my sudden increased incurred costs which are in part on your behalf. This is also justified based on my work history and the ways in which my pay hasn’t kept track with market rates for comparable labor. I would encourage you to consider the transactional costs of finding a replacement at current market rates and factor those into the value you put on my retention as you consider this request, as without being able to pay my bills I may be forced to seek other employment which you will only know about if I succeed at max two weeks out from my disappearance.”
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Well, I don’t have any experience asking it for career advice, but I have worked with it quite a bit and it’s quite shitty once you get to anything that starts resembling complexity. This is definitely not a tool I’d go to for any advice beyond the simplest ones.
Surprisingly, I’ve had the opposite effect. Wherein, it has increased my productivity by tenfold and has helped with code review and/or confirming various logic, etc. Although, I wouldn’t necessarily take what it tells me as gospel from a recommendation standpoint in terms of my career as a whole. I’ve definitely caught it numerous times being wrong, but the inaccuracies pale in comparison to what it gets right, imo.
Don’t get me wrong, it saved me a ton of time. Just recently I needed some coding help that would probably take me hours of searching. Doesn’t mean I’d trust it with advice, that’s something entirely different than spitting out code that works half of the time.
When I tried to use it for code-related questions, it straight up made things up that didn’t exist.
Same here. The most I get out of might be a pointer to a module that could be a better approach, but the code I get from ChatGPT is usually worthless.
I treat it as my water cooler talk, and maybe I’ll come away with a few new ideas.
Like rubber duckying?
Exactly!
