EE vs CS conferences

I am an EE major who woke up one day in a research lab that speaks computer science. Totally baffled by the difference in not just the topics studied, but also methodologies, 15 months later I am still trying to make sense of this new world. Here I want to pick up a specific topic about difference in importance of conferences, their rankings and how does one go about finding good work on a topic.

Disclaimer 1: the following are still early views and I might be wrong in my inferences, would be more than happy to be corrected and/or enlightened more.
Disclaimer 2: My only exposure close to CS has been in networking. So though I am generalizing to CS, I really can only mean "networking conferences"

While admitting that both my graduate stints (in EE and ECE) have been very short, I never sensed a strong focus on a few specific conferences. I saw people around me going to ICC, VTC, globecom, icassp, asilomar (and some to allerton, ciss etc) but it was never a very big prestige issue to go to one or the other, nor did a very strict hierarchy exist amongst these venues. Probably Wiopt and ISIT were the more differentiated ones, because of their focus on a smaller, specialized community on optimization and Info theory respectively. I even saw some good sensor networking researches choosing conferences by the tourism value their venue offered, with a goal to cover all continents (with the possible exception of Antartica) before they graduated! Whenever the work was not purely physical layer or signal processing, I did see people targeting towards Infocom, Mobicom etc and my advisor fretted enough about one Infocom submission to give my present CS colleagues respectable competition. But then I would like to believe that in such situations we had already crossed over to the CS world, so this phenomenon was expected.

In comparison, Computer scientists have their Sigcomms, Nsdis, CoNexts, Sigmetrics, Mobicoms etc and most work outside is treated as invisible. People debate endlessly (as here) on rankings. Whether infocom is Tier-I or Tier-II is discussion-worthy, apparently it is not good to know that its worth looking at, it has to be neatly classified into good, better or best. Complicated combinations of statistics like single track vs multiple track, number of submissions, acceptance ratios, author-to-attendees ratio are crunched to spit out these rankings. Conference statistics and ranking sites abound for CS conferences (like Kevin Almeroth's site, wikipedia article listing conferences by ranking, this blog post and even citeseer's impact factor calculations) but i couldn't find any equivalents for EE.

Is the problem that EE doesn't have any clearly very good conferences (Why?) or is it just a lack of classification. A CS colleague expounded that journals were the real thing in EE with conferences not being of the highest importance, with it being the opposite in CS. Actually I do respect the better-defined methodology and stricter quality control of CS conferences which simplifies a reader's task by giving hints on which papers to read when there are many to choose from. On the contrary ICC, globecom etc with their high 35-45% acceptance rates, 1000 paper conferences and some papers which are totally junk or near 80% plagiarised from previous work make it very difficult to find the gems among the chaff. The EE community has some lessons to learn from their CS counterparts!