r/AIreplacedMe

TL;DR: A week of Unreal work can start in minutes now. What happened the next morning is the part nobody talks about.

 

I remembered back in around 2020 – it was my last day with the China Construction company I’ve worked with for a year. Apparently, I’ve outlasted my usefulness. They have squeezed every ounce of my experience and expertise out of me and technology-transferred it to their own people. They didn’t want to extend my contract.

So I left and drove back home.

Years later, while I was having my evening jog with my wife at the nearby garden, I looked up the sky and remembered this passage:

“Cast your burden on the Lord, And He shall sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved.

And so I did.

I lifted them all up to Him, and the cloud in my head dissipated immediately.

Nothing else changed. I was still jogging with my wife next to me. But my mind was lighter.

A few months later, I got a DM from a long-lost acquaintance. He represented a client, by which my ex-ex-ex-company was building an international Aerospace Centre for, back in 2008.

He remembered me after all these years.

Apparently, he was let go too, and he founded his own company. He landed a Taiwan project in 2021, by which he needed a technical guy who can double up as an interpreter.

And my name crossed his mind. So he looked me up in LinkedIn, and opened the door for me.

Praise God! The Lord came through.

Never loss hope, man.

 

More in the comments — the part about why this still hurts and what actually opens up next.

 

TL;DR: Daron Acemoglu said the 5% math your CFO trusts is backwards.

It looks clean to automate 5% and save half in that slice, but making 100 people 5% better moves the P&L more, and lasts longer when integration hits the jagged edge.

 

Have you guys heard of STAAD Pro?

Or ETAS, SAP2000, etc.?

Well, they are all powerful Civil & Structural analysis and design software.

Back when I was a graduate engineer, working for a C&S Consulting firm in 1999, our office used it fervently for mostly high-rise building design.

It was already a powerful tool – used to analyse and design according to a variety of code of practises of a number of countries – including the ones we’re bound to: BS8110, et. al.

But no matter how powerful it was, it never crosses our mind to let go our Junior Engineers, leaving our Senior Engineers to use the tools – and thus help the company save costs.

That’s just plain stupid.

When the senior engineer is up to his/her neck on something else, who’s going to stand in as substitute representative in client-consultant meetings or site inspections, if we fire the junior engineers in favour of the software?

It’s a tool, man. Always has been. Always will be.

Just like that phrase I heard lately: “AI can automate some TASKS. It cannot automate the JOB.”

I remember one Senior Engineer’s opinion about STAAD Pro: It’s great with analysis. But its reinforcement design seems a bit too light – meaning too close to the bare minimum required in BS8110. Given the way the construction industry tends to cut corners, he wasn’t confident he can allow STAAD pro to have free reign over the full workflow.

And so what he did was to print out the force diagrams from it, and design the reinforcements himself, with his other tools.

That’s judgement and ownership, right there – built from years of experience and intuition.

So coming back to the emergence of all these AI agents.

They help us. Not replace us.

A passage came to mind: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

When things align into their properly intended role, we reap the benefit.

Plain and simple.