I am kind of like of in the same place though roughly 5 years more than author.

I thought about going back to college, learning Math, Statistics, advanced Machine Learning and applying for research role at a frontier lab.

That's a super silly take. As much as I did math and even course on machine learning back in the days and I was making basic perceptron in code at university - to get back and be able to do so on frontier level that's years I don't have anymore.

Anthropic is doing all that also with their LLMs so that ship sailed.

Big thing is — business people are not going to spend time prompting LLM to make an application. If they do then they will become "programmers" and we all (experienced developers) know — you touch it you own it — they (business) will not bother running or taking responsibility.

Right now on r/sysadmin there was bunch of posts where admins have "vibe coded apps" requested to be "productionized". Those business types requesting don't know yet — you touch it you own it — they think they can vibe code app drop it at ops and it is all fun and games. When people will start requesting features, start nagging about bugs, start cursing on whatever changes they introduced it will be back to "hey maybe we will just get someone to do that for us".

  You might not need as deep software dev knowledge but with deep software dev knowledge you still will be faster operating LLM to build systems than non-dev