I would collapse the senior engineer and architect roles into a single role and only hire people capable of doing both.

Owning the modules requires understanding the overall architecture and how the module’s API needs to fit into it, when a new module is required, when the architecture needs to change, and how to pragmatically migrate from one design to another in a live system.

All of that is easier if everyone is capable of operating at any level from overall architecture to micro optimizations.

Yeah it should only count ACCEPTED pull requests.

I mean if people continue checking open source code into GitHub using those new features then they should be able to learn them just fine.

This is only true if there continues to be tremendous amounts of money/hardware/power available to perform the training, in perpetuity.

While reading your comment the Benny Hill theme Yackety Sax started playing in my head.

But for the person building the product it very much is how it does it.

I think we (developers) need to get over that. Code was always the means to an end, which is providing a product to solve a problem, not the end itself.

The code is still the means to the end. AIs still write code, that is compiled and deployed and operated in some manner.

If the product is software the code is the product.

Bell Labs employees were explicitly hired to do research.

You must have a lot of capital already if those are realistic options for you.

You are talking about being a professional chef, not a fast food employee.

I don’t see anything stopping that from happening in the very near future.