I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure. Obviously some developers needed to care more than others, but the vast, vast majority of work and roles just didn’t really need to care about this. 9 times out of 10 you’re using the off the shelf library that already has the optimized bubble sort of whatever for your job

I don't know man. Being able to reason about DS&A was pretty useful before the advent of ML Code Generation. If only to pass the interviews at Google/Facebook (when they were in their prime circa 2004-2016).

Also, didn't the parent comment say he went back to college?