A lot of companies in that domain also prefer hiring them over CS people, it's a culture thing.
Many of them hired EEs in the 70s/80s (and earlier) who became managers. At the time it made more sense (fewer CS folks) but it established a culture of preferring engineers to computer scientists/programmers/(these days)software engineers. I even left a job because they straight up told me no non-EE would ever become a lead (over a 99% software activity). I appreciated their honesty and found the exit.
The usual justification for perpetuating it has to do with the 1% of the job that touches hardware, but IME it's usually either truly specialized and most of the EEs couldn't do it either, or trivial (following directions from the electrical engineering team that actually designed the hardware).
I think there's value in hiring people who have been trained in a standardized process that prioritizes chains of responsibility, detailed analysis and reliability over velocity, flexibility and bug-tolerance.
Plus, these days, the usual electrical engineering curriculum is ~50% programming, which is more than can be said for some CS curricula (which aren't standardized the way ABET does for EE).
That's a very odd assessment, but that's, like, totally your opinion, man.
> I think there's value in hiring people who have been trained in a standardized process that prioritizes chains of responsibility, detailed analysis and reliability over (velocity, flexibility and bug-tolerance.*
You write this as if that's what CS people are taught (to make crappy systems and crappy code), which may be a common feature of many programmers, it is not the thing they're taught to do in school. At least not if they halfway paid attention.
Many of them hired EEs in the 70s/80s (and earlier) who became managers. At the time it made more sense (fewer CS folks) but it established a culture of preferring engineers to computer scientists/programmers/(these days)software engineers. I even left a job because they straight up told me no non-EE would ever become a lead (over a 99% software activity). I appreciated their honesty and found the exit.
The usual justification for perpetuating it has to do with the 1% of the job that touches hardware, but IME it's usually either truly specialized and most of the EEs couldn't do it either, or trivial (following directions from the electrical engineering team that actually designed the hardware).