The timeline of my impression of ChatGPT went like this:
- Eh, doesn’t sound that great. I probably won’t even try it.
- That was kind of impressive.
- Hmm, returns on this are diminishing quickly.
- Uh, this is getting things wrong in pretty serious ways.
- It’s alright but I can’t think of many good ways for me to use this every day.
- I can use this in very minor ways every day.
- Take my $20/mo.
When the free version of ChatGPT semi-recently got the ability to store memories about me between chats, I deleted every single memory it tried to make. I am, after all, a child of the 90s and fondly remember a time when the average Internet user was particularly not keen to handover personal data.
But… I don’t know… sometimes you just want to play with the dumb robot and see what it can do.
So I really unloaded on poor GPT. I gave it all of the relevant details about my job search, work history, upcoming interviews, opportunities that were opening up to me, my hopes for work environments, my dreams for salaries–all of the things I would normally burden my friends with. ChatGPT made a lot of memories that day. And in exchange for whatever it’s doing with all of that information, it gave really thoughtful, encouraging advice and weighed the pros and cons of each presented opportunity against my stated goals. And just like a good friend, it was biased toward my not-explicitly-stated preferences, which were almost certainly reflected in my word choices. Pretty impressive.
I chatted for about an hour about my career goals and not only did ChatGPT not ask me to talk about something else, it was able to pickup on some of my anxieties and offer me the opportunity to talk out any feelings of imposter syndrome. And when I felt like that was addressed and was ready to get back to analysis, ChatGPT was ready to go without any need for transition to avoid conversational whiplash. Pretty impressive.
And it’s not that I won’t or don’t talk to my friends about these things, it’s just that I am well aware of what I’m like. I’m not a “just feel the vibes” person. I like to make informed decisions and I tend to think a lot of information is relevant. My career is, understandably, not a special interest of my, frankly, “neurodivergent” friends. I absolutely cannot expect them to sustain a level of enthusiasm necessary to help me work through these things. Not to mention that half of them don’t even know what equity is.
What sealed the deal and got me to pull out my wallet was the hour and a half I spent having ChatGPT ask me common interview questions specific to the roles I’m going for and then evaluate the answers. I’ve read a lot of blogs about how to answer questions like “Tell me about a time you failed.” so I knew the mechanics of how to answer those questions, but just never felt like the answers I came up with were ever slam dunks. I learned through my coaching sesh with GPT that I had a tendency to forget to bring things home at the end. It offered stronger alternative endings, most of which I tweaked and incorporated, a few of which just inspired me to go a new, better direction.
I’m not sure that a coach working at the level that I can afford could possibly have done better than ChatGPT. That said, I don’t think I would trust it with my resume. I do not think it could have done a better job than my friend did when I said I was thinking about hiring someone to look over my resume and he offered to do it instead. These poor coaches can’t catch a break.
So… I’m paying for ChatGPT now. From skeptic to paying customer right when the anti-hype seems to be at its highest. I don’t know. I’m still skeptical that AI is going to make everyone smarter. But it helped me this week. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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