However, I started programming at the age of ten, and spent years coding assembly language on the Commodore Amiga (that is, mostly programming to-the-metal), including OOP, user interfaces and whatnot – so I was essentially self taught before I even touched programming within the educational system.

I wouldn’t really recommend this route, especially not these days, as programming now usually means desktop environments with access only to very high level APIs. Even game engines (some of the most advanced programming done these days) and audio processing is rather high level stuff now. You’d have to hack Linux kernel drivers or similar to get anywhere near I/O ports, hardware interrupts, DMA etc.

Also, “realtime” (as in, guaranteed response times) is a concept that isn’t even really applicable to normal desktop operating systems, as they generally don’t provide the OS kernel features required to properly support such applications. Professional musical applications is one field you might want to look to for hints as to “abusing” such platforms for realtime applications – but it’s still a very different environment.

TL;DR: Basically, if you’re not already doing control engineering, DSP and similar on embedded systems and know exactly what you’re doing – get the proper education! This is not something you pick up over a few weekends after getting a new job.

Oh, and the salary part: You’ll have to make quite an impression to have any chance of getting paid properly without formal education, I suspect. (Writing a small RTOS + demo app on location did the trick in my case.)

What a college degree will do is open many doors that are otherwise closed.

As for the High School diploma issue: I think everyone needs a high school education. Not everyone and not every career needs a college diploma.

The real question is how does a manager realize you won’t be able to solve the problem he wants to have solved?

Some organizations manage the associate risks by establishing “skill standards” HR can prefilter based on those “standards”. Will qualified candidates get filtered out, count on it. Will unqualified candidates passes the filter, count on it. Titles often are amongst the filtering criteria. In theory I guess this means that they have learned the “best practices”. in practice it means you know how to learn the “best practices”. Definitely no small accomplishment.

That having been stated, the question always becomes one of potential to learn the material vs. proficiency at using the material. Which one is actually needed in the situation?

I look forward to a drastic change in the curriculum and the way of teaching at colleges

microprocessors and microcontrollers
computer architecture
DSP
Networks and OSI layers
introduction to C
advanced C
data structures
OOP
operating systems

Students might not take these courses or these courses might not be taught as well as they should be.
Reason for students not taking it is because some or most of them might not have a clear idea of what embedded systems really is and what kind of work goes into it.
Analog circuit design or higher level application development students will know by their 2nd year in college.
Not for embedded systems. Engineering schools should have more career oriented expo, I don’t mean job fairs, but rather provide 2nd year or 3rd year students with a list of job titles which can be obtained by a EE graduate, or a Comp Engineer graduate. And each title should be explained in detail with relationship to the nature of the job, skill sets required. I believe that is the best way to come close to the outside world.

Yes, you can ‘get by’ without knowing these concepts, but you it’ll be hard for you to do the more theoretical design work, and it’ll take you longer to realize that certain problems belongs in different categories.

Depending on the specialization, it’d be nice to pick up topics such as signal processing(and its branch of topics such as control theory, DSP), statistics, AI, network protocol design, number theory (for encryption), computer languages, OS design, compiler design, etc. Of course, the more breadth, the better, so at least you know where to look for solutions when you hit them.

True, not a lot of college programs target embedded systems so if one is truly interested, he/she would need to put together their own program tailored toward embedded engineering. It may not get you to a point where you can go out and design embedded systems, but it’ll provide you with the fundamentals where you can pick up the rest such as program management (project management is mostly different implementation of the theoretical statistic models) easier.

I agree that college do not provide the graduate with the skills that they can immediately use when they get out in the job, but I don’t think that college should focus solely on those skills. Just like an Electrical engineer is not expected to be able to fix TVs when they get their degree, but they should be able to explain the major technological theories in the design of the TV.

Teaching theories and getting the students to understand it where they can apply it is where college should put their focus on. The actual skills needed on the job should be learned on the job, and in self-learning outside of school.

Additionally:
The Intel Cornell Cup USA, founded by Intel & Cornell Systems Engineering, is a college-level embedded design competition created to empower student teams to become the inventors of the newest innovative applications of embedded technology. Students will also be given the opportunity to enhance their resumes and demonstrate their professional design skills, highly sought by today’s companies, as they transform their ideas into a well-planned, robust reality. To learn more:
http://www.systemseng.cornell.edu/intel/