Jobs Aren't Coming Back

[SoftTalker]

> There are tons of people like me, and they're easy to find on Product Hunt and in r/SaaS

So with the help of ChatGPT, there will be even more people like this, all screaming into the void for attention but getting none because it's all too diluted.

I think building a job or business on top of ChatGPT is like building a retail business on Amazon. If you are successful, competitors will duplicate your offering and undercut your price, or Amazon itself will come out with their own version and promote it ahead of yours. OpenAI, Microsoft, and the other big AI companies will do the same thing. You don't think they have a priviliged inside view of what people are doing with these products?

If ChatGPT is the thing that makes your business idea viable, then it also makes it easier than ever for someone else to copy it.

[johnwheeler]

> I think building a job or business on top of ChatGPT is like building a retail business on Amazon. If you are successful, competitors will duplicate your offering and undercut your price

That's not how it works.

If you haven't talked to anyone, you don't know anything. You're just guessing.

For example, I can go right now on Product Hunt and advertise to people below the fold on the front page and get them to sign up for my subreddit.

There's my audience and I get real customers. Who cares if someone copies me. I'm small and nimble, not trying to be a billionaire

[johnwheeler]

I am seeing it out there. I'm in the weeds everyday on r/SaaS talking to people.

People are scared and there is something really fishy going on in the tech labor market. It's like a big wave that's coming. Everyone says they're hiring and no one really is.

People are trying to scramble to build little businesses out of Notion templates and Wordpress themes and using ChatGPT the best they can. Everyone's got the green "Open to Work"

It's crazy!

[Aurornis]

> People are scared and there is something really fishy going on in the tech labor market. It's like a big wave that's coming. Everyone says they're hiring and no one really is.

Reddit is not a good representative sample of anything real-world. It's where people go to complain.

Companies are definitely hiring, but they're being more selective. For people getting rejected a lot, it's comforting to tell yourself that companies are only pretending to hire people but then rejecting everyone. It's not true, though.

[tuckerconnelly]

My counterpoint: if your product is simply a ChatGPT wrapper, you have no moat. Whatever is complicated enough and is actually making money, and you feel the need to test it and make sure it keeps running, that's your moat, and that's what you're going to want to hire human help for once you actually make some money.

[iamthirsty]

> My counterpoint: if your product is simply a ChatGPT wrapper, you have no moat.

A really low barrier to entry isn't always necessarily a good thing, as someone can usurp your business relatively quickly.

[johnwheeler]

Of course. But that's not what I'm talking about in this article. I'm talking about real solopreneurs building non-AI wrappers

[kemiller]

I think the point is chatgpt as a development partner rather than the core product

[some-guy]

The reason jobs aren't coming back is because startups can't borrow free money. ChatGPT is nowhere near ready to be correct enough to replace humans for important tasks.

[johnwheeler]

It doesn't matter that it is wrong often. Consider this:

When I first used GPT last year, I asked it to "Create me a content delivery network on AWS"

GPT began outputting a fairly comprehensive CDK, which is Code-as-configuration, a layer ontop of AWS SAM, which is another layer over AWS CloudFormation. The script created all the buckets, certificates, policies, and the CloudFront distribution and linked everything together.

It was in JavaScript, and I asked it if they had a Python SDK, and it converted the script into Python.

Then GPT gave me instructions on how to go into my domain provider to setup a CNAME for a CloudFront subdomain of my choice.

THIS IS WHAT HAS BEEN REPLACED:

I would have performed a Google search for "AWS CDN How" or something like that.

Next, I would read AWS documentation until I felt comfortable enough about the components involved. I'd then go into AWS Console and set one up manually by creating the buckets, policies, certificates, and the CloudFront distribution.

I would have wanted a custom domain, so I'd figure out how to setup the CNAME to point to the CloudFront distribution. This would've taken at least two hours for me personally. Knowing nothing about DNS, I'd want to get my bearings and I'd waste time down that rabbit hole.

Burn an extra hour with stupid issues like not having a '.' at the end of the CNAME target. That has actually tripped me up in the past.

Next to make sure I really understood what was going on-- I would tear the CDN down, build it back up, and take notes and put them in the company Confluence.

Afterwards, I would try to automate it the process. Being a generalist and not a DevOps person, I'd probably start searching for some older tech I had heard about but never used: "Ansible AWS", "Puppet AWS" or "Chef AWS".

I'd quickly learn about a thing called CloudFormation and start reading up on it.

I'd realize I had zero interest in learning CloudFormation because it is tedious and error-prone. I would begin to Google for something on top of it.

I'd likely get dumped into a SAM tutorial

Next, I'd start building out a prototype in SAM, and by the time it was half-way done and the week was almost over I'd watch a YouTube video and find out about: CDK

By then, I would have had enough! As a generalist engineer, I'd tell myself, "you're not qualified to setup a CDN. You need DevOps." But then I would pick myself up and push through for another week in more frustration sorting out the rest of the odds and ends. And this is what my career has been like my whole life.

And now GPT is giving me a Python script I can put to use in seconds. It wasn't perfect, and I had some hiccups along the way, but by the end of the day, I had the basics of the CDN I'm using for my product, and I feel I understand it better because it was delivered in such a bite-sized compact script vs me having to cross-reference my memory.

This revelation blew my fucking mind!

So, I don't use GPT for writing code because that's not what it's good at.

I use GPT to automate the very expensive, very time-consuming, highly compensated function of specialized Google Search

[threatofrain]

> for important tasks.

Yeah, but a lot of people do menial tasks like human OCR, just like once upon a time humans were literally called computers and had such a job.

[FrustratedMonky]

Same time I saw this post. Saw other article that tech shortage will happen.

Seems like nobody can tell what is happening.

There are jobs, there no jobs, companies can't find people, but nobody can get hired. etc..

Within two years, 90% of organizations will suffer a critical tech skills shortage

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2135542/within-two-yea...

[FrankWilhoit]

Every startup has one goal: to get big enough to pivot to financialization.

[tombert]

It does kind of concern me that as a society we've just kind of decided that Ponzi schemes are fine as long as we have some fancy Silicon Valley branding attached to it. WeWork is the most glaring example of a company that seemed to operate something Ponzi-adjacent and just kept growing on that until they became public and then became the shareholder's problem.

[meow_mix]

bait --> marketing their product

[Shrezzing]

>employees are the most expensive thing a SaaS business has.

I'm pretty sure for the overwhelming majority of (successful) SaaS businesses, the most expensive part is the marketing & advertising budget. 30-50% isn't uncommon, because the returns on successful sign-ups are enormous.

[johnwheeler]

Not so. early stage funding goes to hiring.

[jacknews]

"Pretty soon, SaaS companies are going to be a mixture of founders, a small number of experts, and ChatGPT."

And by implication, all companies.

But, what are the rest of the people going to do, and who will the customers be when no-one has a job?

We are going to need to rethink the structure of society.

[nholland42]

It's easy to think this way when the labor market is in a bad position. When there's inevitably an upswing in the economy, companies will hire like crazy again.

[iamthirsty]

> Just keep the experts around.

This has always been a thing with small business, especially in the age of higher interest rates + rising wages + end of VC over-spending era.

[digging]

I think the core idea makes sense, but this article is quite difficult for me to parse and is extremely short on details or evidence. Would love to read a more thoroughly thought out piece on the topic.

What I am curious about is how we manage this as a society. The one thing I am sure won't happen is every tech worker becomes an expert ChatGPT wrapper in some niche. How could there possibly be enough of a market for everyone to survive doing that?

[johnwheeler]

I came up with it pretty quick this morning and posted it on LinkedIn.

It's just anecdotal evidence and what I'm seeing. I really am out there in the weeds solopreneur'ing and talking to people. You can check my reddit history

https://www.reddit.com/user/demofunjohn/

So it's just my experience. I didn't do any market research.

I think the fact that this post is resonating strong is testament to how people feel though

[iamthirsty]

Yeah, I feel similarly. It's an extreme over-generalization making a relatively intentionally proactive statement using very vague anecdata.

[meow_mix]

Another marketer marketing

[tombert]

I use ChatGPT pretty much every day (enough to where I could probably call myself a "prompt engineer" if I didn't think that that was kind of asinine), I'm pretty good with it, and the reason I did that was kind of for the reasons laid out in this blog post.

I've always been of the opinion of that for anything involving "at will employment", the name of the game is "adapt or die". Fundamentally corporations are sociopathic [1], and if they don't think that they're getting enough value from you, they will fire you and/or not hire you. It's decidedly not-personal, they just don't feel like you're contributing enough to give them a sufficient return on investment.

There are plenty of trends that I've thought were kind of dumb but I try and get at least minimally competent simply because I'm afraid that if I don't then a company will fire me and hire some kid straight out of school who is excited for this stuff. I learned basic Ethereum Solidity stuff, for example, even though I think cryptocurrency is pretty stupid, because I was afraid that that might end up being the trend, whether or not I agree with it. I learned Node.js very shortly after it got any traction (2012) because even though I hated JS at the time, I felt like there was a good chance that Node would catch on. I actually don't think that ChatGPT is stupid, I think it's generally useful, but I've become competent with using it for the same reasons.

I get a little annoyed that people act like they're entitled to have the same job for forever and won't be forced to adapt to the times. That would be great, but that's not going to fucking happen, and it's not new with AI. You've always been at risk of being replaced with new technology and automation, and that's not a bad thing.

[1] The people there aren't necessarily sociopathic, but businesses are a sort of separate thing that makes it much easier for these people to carry out sociopathic things.

[johnwheeler]

Right, I finally realized. I’m a damn prompt engineer.

Have you been using the upload file feature of desktop? Game changer

I iterate, upload, iterate, upload. You can upload multiple files. It loses a bit of context sometime for some reason but it beats pasting in 20 pounds of code.

[some-guy]

The only thing I use ChatGPT for is to generate simple bash scripts, and even that is mostly just a time-saver--I still need to sift through and make sure the code is actually correct which is only about 80% of the time.