Regarding the EE bashing, there's an element of truth but overall it is an unfair characterization. I think the true source of the problem lies not in the EE d

Regarding the EE bashing, there's an element of truth but overall it is an unfair characterization. I think the true source of the problem lies not in the EE degree or lack of a CS degree, but in a specific, weird distrust of abstraction by in the institutional culture of embedded systems development. This opposition (and it is opposition, not merely ignorance) isn't coming from the degree per se but from the field as it is sometimes practiced. My guess is that the reason for this culture is that long ago, there was a history of "fancy newfangled compilers" screwing up the code, engineers getting repeatedly burned, and learning not to trust such "fancy" tools. This attitude may have made some sense a long time ago, but now it's an institutional relic. So the irony is: the engineers are avoiding abstraction in order to increase reliability, but they wind up decreasing it because the code becomes impossible to manage. Anyway, this is not a defect in the way EE's are educated, it is a very specific subculture of embedded systems development, which traditionally happens to tend to hire EE's.