Being an actual engineer (software) is different to just being a software engineer, and the former is very commonly highly regulated.

Being an actual engineer myself, I discovered that an official Professional Engineer license has little correlation with competence.

I don't really doubt that, and that's why I'm glad software in general places much less emphasis on licensing than other industries.

In italy software engineers are actual engineers.

I hope, for the sake of your software industry, that this only relates to calling yourself an engineer, and not to the general practice of software development. If you have to be a licensed engineer to work in software in Italy then that'd be a colossal drag on anything interesting happening in that industry.

No, that's not mandatory. Actually, only the big, shitty, consultancy shops (Accenture, Deloitte, etc) look stricly for licensed engineers, mostly because, funnily enough, they're usually hired for much less than the average SWEs. Actually there's kind of a shared feeling in the industry that licensed software engineers are dumbasses.

They want licensed engineers so they hire them as consultants and pay no sick leave and vacations.

Becoming licensed is mostly needed if you want to work on your own. You pay less taxes but have ZERO safety, so in theory you should earn much more and work for many customers. But those shitty consultancy companies hire consultants and pay them very little.

That's actually really amusing. Thanks for the insight!