I found the computer engineering paths to be more engaging from a mechanical sympathy perspective. Starting from pure abstractions and then maybe dipping into

I found the computer engineering paths to be more engaging from a mechanical sympathy perspective. Starting from pure abstractions and then maybe dipping into hardware level concerns in later courses seems completely backward to me. Certainly, you can become a very useful employee without any hardware background, but there is a particular spider sense you will not have when presented with scenarios that a hardware person will feel in their bones. The most common manifestation of this is disrespect for memory heirarchy and latency of computational elements relative to each other. The CS course material became deeply interesting to me only after I encountered specific problems where digging into the theoretical min/max of different algorithms started to produce value in actual projects. When looking at things from the perspective of upper bounds, you will typically find that N is small enough to not matter. Only when it becomes large do the fancy abstractions make any difference at all on actual machines. If your working set fits in L1, O(N^2) scaling probably won't be something you notice in your profiler.