Most EE EDA/CAD tools are ancient monstrosities of patchwork with a user experience reminiscent of using eclipse 0.01. Full of bugs, lack of fast CLI tools. Everything must start a core process that takes many seconds to even boot. It's ridiculous. Software engineers don't know how good they have it in terms of tools.
I started off doing digital design but quickly switched to embedded software after seeing the state of tooling. It's not just the tools themselves either. There are folks who will vehemently defend the way things are and shoot down even the slightest improvement efforts as naïve. With that culture in place, I'm happy just having someone else slap a cortex-mX on a board and programming it with gcc/makefiles/openocd.
Being able to do that for embedded software is also a sign that things are changing. For the longest time embedded devices were only programmable from a vendor supported IDE (looking at you TI and Cypress). At least now the open source community have figured out how to get around the limitations and the tools are starting to flourish with increasing vendor support.
