They said, yeah, I still know I do not want to sit around. I don't know why we're not using something like AI to do all this work. And then I can be more creative working on the solutions. But they said, it feels like structural engineering is a data entry job, and I think that's a challenge, right? This idea that young people, early career people, come out of college and we have to make them pay their dues and make them do all this manual work and grunt work because they've got to pay their dues and they need to learn how things work from the bottom up. I'm like, we get to hand them their computers and hand them calculators. We can advocate. How far back do we go to say a young engineer or architect has to pay their dues? One, we've got to kill that vocabulary of, like pay your dues. Give people the best tools that are available, and let them run, right? That's what everyone wants. I think culturally, we probably came from the generation we did as we were told. We didn't have the confidence of this younger generation. But I'll play this younger generation. They are much more confident, and they are a lot smarter than we are. We can sit here and have debates like, every generation complains about the next generation. We were lazy to the boomers. But I'll tell you, the generation coming out, they are figuring it out faster than any of us, and they do not want to work for an employer that's got their head stuck in the sand. The second point I'll make is we have to start thinking about this wild idea. Does everybody in an architecture firm or an engineering firm need to be an architect or an engineer? If you go to a doctor, there are so many other people who are not doctors.
You spend ten minutes with your doctor, you spend an hour with everybody else.
And this bias we have that, oh, you can only be an architect or work in an architecture firm outside of, like, marketing and admin on the same thing with engineering. As these tools get so accurate, why do you need to be an engineer? Maybe you need someone who has a better relationship ability, who can manage customers better, who communicates better, and all the other skills that the customers of AEC firms massively complain about. It's very rare that a real estate owner or developer says, I don't like the way they design buildings. That's rarely the point. It's usually that they don't communicate well. They don't understand how to manage a project, they are always late. I do not understand their invoices. It’s everything but the work that the KPReddy Email: kp@shadow.vc Website: Shadow Ventures
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