Eh, I got my comp sci degree in the 2000s and for the most part we learned barely enough to pass the exams. Colleges weren't exactly churning out an army of disciplined professionals well versed in low level programming. Most of us ended up working on PHP or Rails or some Enterprise Java monstrosity.

Then came of the flood of Leetcode in the 2010s. If you memorized the top 100 interview puzzles, you would have had a good chance to get paid 5x more than a kernel or firmware engineer, and you could have ridden the stock market to generational wealth