I've been exposed to some cool people and things because of the awesome communities I've joined. Recently, in an interesting conversation with a respected and senior engineer with nearly 2 decades of experience in the industry, we ended up talking about "AI Engineers".
He told me that almost 10 years ago, he was conducting interviews for a big tech company. The great credentials of the candidates aside, they'd tell him all of the amazing stuff that they were doing- computer vision, ML, robotics etc, which would make for an interesting 10 minute conversation followed by a "Okay, can you reverse a Linked List?", that would leave many confused and many could not do it.
Some years later, he realized that they were the cavemen in this scenario, not the candidates. Candidates were being evaluated on a practice which they had evolved from and they were dumbing it down for them (so to speak). It's roughly the same with this age of AI development now. You can now churn out products faster and (in some cases) better than before because of AI which allows you to meet and evaluate the higher level metrics. Now, a good idea doesn't have to stay in the "one day I will" basket of ideas which will never see the light of day. You can push out a functioning MVP, refine it and start meeting customer needs at a much faster rate than before.
These metrics have their fair share of value for sure but it might be time we start reevaluating this rubric altogether because the age of AI is not stopping. Maybe in a few years we'd have the same realization as him where we might be faced with a choice- either get on the AI train or get run over by it. I wonder what we'll choose.