I wish all the logs at my company were as beautiful as these terminal logs

Sure, look at their personal projects. I’m just saying the maintainability and quality of the code and speed of iteration is more of the point than how impressive the math is behind an ML algorithm. I’ve just seen a lot of ML engineers/data scientists who really suck at writing maintainable code

I honestly don’t think that doing these cool things improves your odds of getting hired. Junior Devs don’t really touch these parts of a platform, let alone lead development on them from scratch.

A valuable engineer, to me, is someone who writes clean, maintainable code and follows common patterns. That’s also something which has to be learned by trial and error to actually see the value of.