>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.

Conversely, I've got a PhD in math, and all my tenure (whether it was bigcorp - Google, etc - or smallcorp) was about algorithms and performance where off-the-shelf library does not exist, and you can't throw compute at the problem to do it the dumb way.

To each their own.