Young Engineer Fired After Building AI That Replaces Human Workers

At 26 he was fired from his “dream job”: he worked 80 hours a week building AI agents that replace humans By Piers Morgan / March 11, 2026 atOptions={'key':'895f57a8b7f4fc799acab26a4785fcbb','format':'iframe','height':250,'width':300,'params':{}} The night he got fired, the city was unusually quiet.

Or maybe it only seemed that way because, for the first time in months, he stepped outside the office before midnight and actually listened. The glass towers around him hummed with servers and air conditioning and faraway traffic, a soft mechanical ocean that had become the soundtrack of his twenties.

He stood on the sidewalk, holding a cardboard box with his life distilled into four objects: a coffee-stained mug, a pair of noise-canceling headphones, a half-dead spider plant from his desk, and a company hoodie that still smelled faintly of burnt espresso and the cold metallic tang of server rooms.

The Dream Job That Ate Him Alive At 23, when he first walked through the gleaming lobby doors, the job felt like a golden ticket. The startup was still small enough to feel like a secret and big enough to feel inevitable.