this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Many Gen Z employees say ChatGPT is giving better career advice than their bosses (www.cnbc.com)
submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] Contramuffin@lemmy.world 108 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] GBU_28@lemm.ee 46 points 9 months ago

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 company. Describe features and actions of a better candidate/ employee."

You will get very different answers

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 34 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] realharo@lemm.ee 32 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

Yeah for questions like that, take the top 10 results on google, throw them into a blender, and that will be ChatGPT’s answer

[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How would ChatGPT know what I want to hear?

[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ioslife@lemmy.ml 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is why it drives me insane that people call it AI

[–] emptiestplace@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

We're just word predictors too.

[–] Euphoma@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I actually saw an article on researchers that found it answers better if you ask it to answer like it was in star Trek

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

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".

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Haha chat gpt is really just the memory parasites from Rick and Morty.

[–] daddy32@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Nonsense. Not "about anything". ChatGPT gives correct advice in many fields, some of which are directly verifiable - for example programming.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 50 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] glowie@h4x0r.host 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

When I tried to use it for code-related questions, it straight up made things up that didn't exist.

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

That's my biggest issue with AI. I've tried using it to help me code and it's a way more often than not. It's great for doing find/replace or guessing what I want a function to do and giving me a skeleton that I can change to do what I want. But anytime I try to do something a bit advanced, it chokes.

Like this week I needed help with a regex match pattern, and it straight up gave me wrong code multiple times in a row. And not even multiple wrong answers, the same goddamned wrong answer 3 or 4 times in a row.

[–] 7fb2adfb45bafcc01c80@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

I actually wonder if that's a benefit for young people just starting out on their career journey. It's mostly about feelings and a general sense and not specific opportunities to advance a career. In a lot of ways, a well established manager whose from another generation is not in time with those feelings and the difficulties with navigating them in a complex corporate environment.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There's something to be said for the abilities of a tool reflecting its wielder.

In research circles, the most advanced pipelines in terms of prompting have a 90% success rate at things the same model only gets right around 30% of the time with naive zero shot prompting.

At a minimum, people should be familiar with chain of thought prompting if using the models. That one is very easy to incorporate and makes a huge difference on complex problems.

Though for anyone actually building serious pipelines for these products, the best technique I've seen to date was this one from DeepMind:

We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning modules such as critical thinking and step-by-step thinking, and compose them into an explicit reasoning structure for LLMs to follow during decoding. SELF-DISCOVER substantially improves GPT-4 and PaLM 2's performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as BigBench-Hard, grounded agent reasoning, and MATH, by as much as 32% compared to Chain of Thought (CoT). Furthermore, SELF-DISCOVER outperforms inference-intensive methods such as CoT-Self-Consistency by more than 20%, while requiring 10-40x fewer inference compute. Finally, we show that the self-discovered reasoning structures are universally applicable across model families: from PaLM 2-L to GPT-4, and from GPT-4 to Llama2, and share commonalities with human reasoning patterns.

So yes, maybe you aren't getting a lot out of the models. But a lot of people are, and the difference between your experiences and theirs may just boil down to experience in using the tool. If I just started using Photoshop for an hour or two I might complain about how the software sucks at making good looking images. But we both know it wouldn't be the software's fault.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well, one more comment like that and I guess I'm gonna have to edit my original comment, because I don't want to explain again. I'm getting quite a lot out of LLMs (GPT-4, to be specific), it's just that they're very stupid. When they don't straight up lie, they don't know stuff. It's quite simple, really, I usually deal with very complex problems that few people dealt with, the AI has (close to) no data on that, so it runs in circles and is not able to help.

But when presented with questions that it has training data on, it's brilliant - recently I needed to use reflection to get all types implementing an interface in .NET with the caveat that the interface is generic. GPT-4 was able to solve that problem 3rd message in the conversation, while I'm pretty sure it would take me hours, because I'd need to learn a lot of .NET's internal workings before arriving at the quite simple solution.

So, a good career advice - which one do you feel like it is? A simple question with a straight correct solution, or a complex and nuanced issue where there isn't one general truth? Because the only correct answer to a request for career advice by someone who doesn't know your situation extensively is (a version of) "I don't know, what's your situation in detail?". Knowing GPT, it didn't ask that question.

So yes, LLMs are great! Just learn which use-cases it excels at and don't ask it for complex advice.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

When they don't straight up lie, they don't know stuff. It's quite simple, really, I usually deal with very complex problems that few people dealt with, the AI has (close to) no data on that, so it runs in circles and is not able to help.

You need to provide it the data. The fact they know things at all pretrained was kind of a surprise to everyone in the industry. Their current usecase as a Google replacement is really not ideally aligned with the capabilities. But the models have turned out to be surprisingly good at in context learning and are having increased context windows, so depending on the model you can absolutely provide it relevant reference material to ground the responses with a factual reference point before asking for deeper analysis. It's hard to give specific recommendations without knowing more about what you are trying to accomplish, but "they're very stupid" runs extremely counter to most of what I've seen at this point, and the rare cases where that seems to be the case there's usually something more nuanced getting in the way and a slight modification to what or how I'm asking gets past it.

Knowing GPT, it didn't ask that question.

Really? I find that the chat models are almost overturned to asking for more details as part of their reengagement strategy. In fact, a number of the employment related usage examples I've seen were things like users having the model ask a series of questions about work history and responsibilities in order to summarize resume fodder. So again, maybe a bit of a difference between users of the tools.

Just learn which use-cases it excels at and don't ask it for complex advice.

My use of the models is almost entirely related to complex scenarios and while I'd agree that something like GPT-3 is dumb as shit, GPT-4 is probably among the smarter interactions I've had in my life and I used to consult for C-suite execs of Fortune 500s. One of my favorite results was explaining the factors I suspected were influencing it getting a question wrong and it generating a correct workaround that was quite brilliant (the issue was token similarity to a standard form of a question and the proposed solution was replacing the nouns with emojis, which did bypass the similarity bias and allowed it to answer correctly when it was failing before). In spite of there being no self-introspection capabilities, giving it background details resulted in novel and ultimately correct out-of-the-box solutions.

From the sound of it, you are trying to use it for coding. I recommend switching to one of the models that specializes in that rather than using a generalist model.

And on the off chance you are using the free 3.5 version - well stop that. That one sucks and is like using an Atari when there's a PS3 available instead. Don't make the mistake of extrapolating where the tech is at based on outdated tech being provided for free as a foot on the door.

[–] bhamlin@lemmy.world 35 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 33 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I have never, ever asked my boss, or chat gpt, about career advice. :)

[–] ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 10 points 9 months ago

Is the advice something along the lines of once you have a couple years of relevant experience start looking for a new job that needs that experience?

Because that's how you get good increases in income at least in your early career.

Later on you'll hit a plateau of sorts where changing employers to get a raise is trickier because they're concerned about paying too much for you to come on board, so your job search will take a bit longer. But someone will probably hire you eventually for a good sized increase.

[–] FluffyPotato@lemm.ee 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] shani66@ani.social 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't see how that's news, management is incompetent by default. You could ask a frog and get better answers than you would from most management teams.

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

This really depends on whether the manager has a degree in business or in something useful.

[–] dog_@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

My generation sucks!