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What we need is an intermediary; an Engineering degree that hands you some basics of CS and a whole lot of critical thinking. The whole aim of a degree like that is to point you in the right direction and let your interests develop into a career.

You may not have it in the states, but the rest of the world does. I graduated a five-year (160 credit hour) curriculum in "Computer Engineering" which is a bundle of low-level courses (circuts, electronics, assembly, microelectronics, digital integrated circuits), programming courses (c++, c#, object oriented software development), software lifecycle courses (software engineering, project management), math, pure engineering courses (statics, electromechanical systems), and more. It's recognized as an engineering degree by the Engineers Guild, and has given me, above all, the "Engineering Sense" that I apply daily in my development work.

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I'm in the uk :-) What you mention is perfect - and Ive seen a few of these courses in the last cople of years. We definitely need more - and they should be pitched as a solid alternative to pure cs.

You are right; this is one area the eu is doing better in.

UC Davis has both Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering, in addition to its Computer Science degree.

They are points along a gradient of a mixture of CS classes and digital circuits classes.

However, at no point do the CS classes move from theoretical to practical, all the CS classes you end up are the traditional type. So at Davis you're still not getting a "industry programmer" type of CS education, you're just getting academic CS + circuits :)

Your situation sounds similar, with the additional of the two software PM and process classes you mention. Although I'm curious if you think they were helpful, is that a teachable subject?

It makes sense, I've studied 'IT engineering' here in Italy, and we can also get the best of both worlds. The sad thing is that as an engineer you'll be always labeled as a technical person, and somehow not competent when it comes to crucial functional decisions, especially when you end up working for a big corporate, where business analysts are more likely to be former MBAs..

Another italian here, and other than confirming what cesco said i can also add that one of the two CS-oriented degree available in italy also contains the dreaded "Philosophy of Science" referred in the linked post :)

Hmmm, that's true in the US as well. Are there any countries/cultures in the world where "technical people" get a seriously greater amount of respect?

MIT takes it position as the world's preeminent technical school seriously and in the mid-80s decided this was the single biggest external issue it/the STEM professions had.

It's an ego problem. They can't do your job, so they assume you can't do theirs. If you could, then clearly you're smarter and that's hard to handle.

Of course the real problem is that non-tech people rely more on political skills and networking to get and keep their jobs. Their day to day work skill set is often quite low.

I attended (but sadly, never graduated) the University of Central Florida in the US as a Computer Engineering major and the courses were as you described: Engineering + Math + Computer Science.

Computer Science in the US is very similar. Just replace the advanced low-level courses with algorithms and data structures (we still do computer architecture and assembly).

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