ChatGPT’s Impact on Headcount – What’s Your Experience?

Question

I&rsquo;ve found it interesting that ChatGPT sparked fresh concern about AI&rsquo;s impact on jobs and yet many months later we have historically low unemployment in the US.Obviously, such impact wouldn&rsquo;t be instantaneous, but I&rsquo;ve wondered how companies are thinking about this in terms of headcount planning.From conversations with friends it seems that a common approach is attrition with non-replacement. Companies are using ChatGPT and similar tools to increase productivity, but don&rsquo;t want to fire a lot of people due to the negative impact on morale on those that remain&mdash;and the fact, I assume, it&rsquo;s not yet clear how much of a productivity gain will occur where, so they don&rsquo;t even know exactly who to fire yet.I was wondering what others on HN are seeing. How are your companies approaching this? Is attrition with non-replacement a common strategy? If so, what might that mean for the future job market and unemployment rate?

bigDinosaur · Accepted Answer

Worth noting that copilot has been in active use by many devs I know before ChatGPT and that doesn't appear to have eliminated jobs. Fundamentally your job is to understand - not just type characters into a terminal. I think you might be shocked how bad things would get for a person who lacks any understanding of what they're doing if they just concatenate ChatGPT output indefinitely.

bitshaker · Answer

I started a company with a combination of no-code tools and LLMs to help me program some of the rest.
I’ve got a degree in CS, but haven’t programmed professionally in 15 years.
These new tools have allowed me to create something even larger teams would struggle with on my own in a matter of months.
I’m astonished at the progress I’m able to make without much assistance.
There is often something I’ll need to sit and debug or figure out the name for if I want to ask Google or the LLM helping me code, but that’s about it.
As far as I’m concerned, that means I haven’t needed to hire at least 2-3 full time engineers, be fully bootstrapped, and profitable from day 1 at launch.
Maybe I’ll hire people in the future, but so far the LLMs have replaced engineers, copywriters, designers, and customer support roles. I can handle it all on my own or have the LLM (in the case of customer support) do a decent enough job that I don’t even have to do it anymore.

iamflimflam1 · Answer

ChatGPT works really well if you are doing something that is mainstream and well understood.
For example - I've been writing a presentation on image processing and needed a whole bunch of examples. OpenCV has a ton of blog posts, documentation, stack overflow content for it to have learnt from. So it's been great. I can just ask it for some python code to demonstrate some particular algorithm and it can give me really helpful code and suggestions.
I'm also working on a Rails app at work, again, very mainstream, lots of source material for it to have learnt and generalised from. It's a fantastic pair programmer to talk to about how to approach things. And to be honest, I could not use things like ActiveAdmin without it.
Also, I can't stress enough, if you are using 3.5 and not 4 then you really can't comment on how good ChatGPT is.

muzani · Answer

It has been masked by layoffs. It's really hard to actually tell. Companies are still in lean hiring mode. Is that because of lack of work to do or productivity rising to the point that no extra people are needed?

siva7 · Answer

Senior devs profit heavily from ChatGPT since they can tell bullshit apart from correct answers and know how and what to ask. Otherwise i don&rsquo;t see much of an impact on the headcount. It helps being already an expert in the subject matter.

whateveracct · Answer

0 impact

bravetraveler · Answer

The powers that be are just as reluctant to give us staff as ever.I think my peers have started to rely on it too much, so much of my time is battling ideas that hold absolutely no water

elfbargpt · Answer

I am excited about AI / machine learning, and I do think ChatGPT is a really cool engineering feat, but in it's current state I don't see it displacing too many jobs.Basically right now it's a fairly accurate assistant that you can communicate with via text only. I just don't know how many jobs can be replaced with that.

uptownfunk · Answer

It&rsquo;s just another variation of &ldquo;do more with less&rdquo;

ChatGPT’s Impact on Headcount – What’s Your Experience?

It has been masked by layoffs. It's really hard to actually tell. Companies are still in lean hiring mode. Is that because of lack of work to do or productivity rising to the point that no extra people are needed?

Senior devs profit heavily from ChatGPT since they can tell bullshit apart from correct answers and know how and what to ask. Otherwise i don’t see much of an impact on the headcount. It helps being already an expert in the subject matter.

0 impact

The powers that be are just as reluctant to give us staff as ever.
I think my peers have started to rely on it too much, so much of my time is battling ideas that hold absolutely no water

It’s just another variation of “do more with less”