On that path after 12 years of blood and sweat as a HW engineer in various FAANG companies. Self teaching myself Algos so that I can eventually leetcode the day light out of my life and take a crack at the same FAANG this time as a SW engineer. The problem with the whole EE landscape is much beyond the Mandarin syndrome. It’s systemic. In fact the canary in the coal mine is Berkeley where the enrollment in graduate level EE courses in analog circuit design and RFIC have been falling rapidly as more and more grads prefer the “deep learning” bandwagon much more than the traditional popcorn chip design and manufacturing which was the mainstay of the local Silicon Valley economy until I was in grad school. Back to my BFS study from clrs :-)