Yes a software engineer understanding data structures and runtime complexity is akin to a violin player understanding the physics of acoustic dispersion.
So here’s the thing… I did an EE/CS dual degree. I’m going to focus on the EE side of it for a bit.
We learn the high level practical behaviour of devices: resistors, capacitors, BJT and MOSFET transistors, opamps, logic gates, etc in 2nd year. What we learn there is enough to be an effective practical circuit designer.
We also dive deep into how that stuff works under the hood. One course I remember fondly started the first lecture with “This course is called semiconductor physics. To understand semiconductor physics you need to understand solid state physics. To understand solid state physics, you need to understand quantum mechanics. We have a lot of material to cover so let’s get started.” A similar course was Electric and Magnetic Fields, where we spent a ton of time applying vector calculus to situations of varying complexity to get a better understanding of how the things we learned in 2nd year actually work and some of the limitations that you wouldn’t pick up on from the practical (generally first-order) models.
You don’t get to graduate with an EE degree without learning this stuff. And in my mind, that stuff is like a mixture of data structures, runtime complexity, assembler, and cache coherency. Fundamental understanding that while you won’t use directly in your day-to-day work but underpins everything you do.
The job market for EEs...still isn't as hot as for CS people. However, you could also focus on DSPs in EE and use it to get a heads up on machine learning. This assumes you are ready to specialize, however. Anyways, none of it should go to waste.
I’m quite a ways into my career and being able to dance up and down the “full stack” from designing circuit boards, to writing low level firmware, to backends in Python/Elixir/Java/etc, to frontends in JS/ObjC/Kotlin/Swift/Dart has been a lot of fun. I did the dual EE/CS degree because the “computer engineering” program wasn’t introduced until a few years after I graduated.
That’s all kind of missing the point though. This whole thread has been a discussion about whether Software Engineers need to get down into the nitty gritty low-level stuff. My take is absolutely yes. You might not use it directly every day, but you’ll make consistently better design decisions if you really feel it in your bones. Over on the electrical engineering side of the world you don’t get to graduate without that background understanding. In the software engineering world some people seem to take pride in their ignorance of the foundations they’re building in; in my 20-ish years of experience, those people often end up building things that work poorly and they don’t have the background understanding needed to fix it.
