But virtually nobody does it. The NCEES even abandoned their Software Engineer licensing exam a few years ago because nobody was taking it.
Last time I looked, I couldn't find any. Some states tried for a while, but I think they all gave up.
You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree. Or at least decades of alleged experience in the field.
Even the cook at the bistro on the corner is liable if the food, cleaning or refrigeration isn't as it is supposed to be
That's not the standard for any kind of engineering. Professional Engineers make errors all the time. But they also design systems with fail safes, redundancies, safety factors, etc... You design systems with the expectation that failures will happen. Users will do stupid things. Highly improbably sequences will probably happen.
Not all code needs to be designed so carefully. Nobody cares if Hacker News is offline for a few hours. But the software systems in self driving cars or running an MRI machine probably should be designed by licensed professionals who can stand up to their bosses and say "this can't ship until these improvements are made" because if it does ship, they can be personally sued for malpractice and lose their license.
Personally, I like „software engineering“ as it is — being a free profession where talent counts more than a degree.
Are you saying for MD or PE that talent doesn't matter?
Anybody can say they are a software engineer. The title means nothing.
Some people go to places where their low talent but high cash flow allows them to get a license.
MD at least means something. "Software engineer" means nothing.
They both mean something. You have to dive in to get the real scope regardless. If you just need a title for your commerical MD would carry more weight around diet products and a developer around a new software offering.
Good luck with that here.
FTFY.
Cynically, Me.
You are not required to do the exam, provided there is no civil liability or signing projects as the legally responsible Software/Informatics Engineering.
One more case of mistakenly presenting 'Europe' as an homogenous entity, whereas it depends on countries like anywhere else.
In France anyone can claim an engineer position, it is not licensed. You just cannot tell you hold an engineer degree if you haven't one; and that's pretty theoretical, because basically nobody uses the proper formal title (unlike for example in Germany where they always use the words Dipl. Ing.), so you can always fall back on claiming you are talking about the position and not the degree title.