Not arguing that Gates isn't a total bastard with how he ran things but that was decades ago and he hasn't been in charge for just about as long.
We need to stop making him the target of rants and focus on the people who are actively destroying software and democracy. The current crop of ceos and board members are arguably worse with even less oversight and regulations combined with more wieldable power. Focusing on Gates is just diverting attention from these current monsters.
Our program required at least one electrical engineering course where we covered transistors and logic gates and solving circuits and stuff. Breadboarding and the like.
We had low-level hardware courses (memory architecture, assembly, etc.), then operating systems covered the hardware to software gap, with general programming, programming types/languages and overall broad knowledge on how algorithms and design patterns create and solve problems across the layers of abstraction.
A CS degree would be good for the dabbling in the EE with expanded knowledge of the layers of abstraction that build up modern software.