I doubt that it will matter much. As a tech, you're major contributions won't be theory, but your ability to build, solider, rework and take measurements in the lab. If you become competent at lab equpment, then you've done the best you can.
A couple years ago, I was working on a problem with a flash memory interface. My processor was intermittently freezing up while trying to read the flash memory. I couldn't capture any measurement data that proved the problem. My boss came in and set up the oscilloscope to show the history of every transaction, and use different colors to show how often a trace occured. The result was that on a rare occasion, the data from the memory came late, as shown by the color indication a rare occurance. To this day, I still don't know how he set up the test. If you can do that kind of work, you'll be light years ahead of the pack. Engineers typically don't take their own lab measurements, and rely on a tech's capabilities to get good lab data.
I also want to say that electronics can no longer be seperate from programming, and you need to be able to do both.