"Software Engineer" (without German translation) is used as an official job title by many German companies and the German linkedin is also full of people describing themselves as Software Engineers. This is the first time I hear such an objection.
My translation:
The job title _software developer_ is not a protected job title in Germany and Austria.
According to German law, the job title _software engineer_ may only be used by those who have successfully completed a technical degree. In Austria, the title of engineer can also be acquired through training at an HTL [Höhere Technische Lehranstalt, aprox.: Higher Technical College].
Die Berufsbezeichnung _Softwareentwickler_ ist in Deutschland und Österreich keine geschützte Berufsbezeichnung.
Die Berufsbezeichnung _Softwareingenieur_ darf nach deutschem Recht nur führen, wer ein technisches Studium mit Erfolg abgeschlossen hat. In Österreich kann der Ingenieurstitel auch durch die Ausbildung an einer HTL erworben werden.
As if Google Deutschland would not hire you as a Software Engineer (or SRE, ..) if you are missing a B.Sc. (or did it in a non-technical field) but everything else is perfect.
Job adverisments in German almost exclusively use the term "Software-Entwickler" ("software developer"), indicating that an IT degree is not necessarily required for the job.
If my job title is Software Engineer, then this is of course what it written on my business card that my employer prints for me.
> Job adverisments in German almost exclusively use the term "Software-Entwickler"
This is just not true.
> If my job title is Software Engineer, then this is of course what it written on my business card that my employer prints for me.
If you are not entitled to do use the title, then it is illegal nevertheless. After all, the law applies regardless of whether it is followed.
>> Job adverisments in German almost exclusively use the term "Software-Entwickler"
> This is just not true.
A search for "Softwareingenieur" or "Software-Ingenieur" on gulp.de, the leading IT freelancer platform in Germany currently gives zero results. If you search for "Software engineer" you get results mixed with "Softwareentwickler". So I went through these results which gave me aprox. 10 cases where they were looking explicitely for an "engineer" ("aprox." because I excluted those where "engineer" was one option among others or were they were mentioning the field "engineering" -- but even those were only a few). In contrast to that, when I searched for "Entwickler" or "developer", I got 275 results.[1] So the proportion of "engineer" is aprox. 3.6 % to that of "developer"/"Entwickler". I think it is okay to call that "almost exclusively".
[1] Some of it are a bit general, so you may not want to count everything. A quick random sample seems to indicate that the number is low nevertheless; so I went with 275, because the end result is unlikely to be significantly different.