Again, as the parent commenter, you're confusing academic degree with job title. You cannot call yourself an engineer if not enrolled in the Order (regardless if you have an engineering degree or not), but you can assume a software engineering role without any issue.

Tell that to HR, profiling CVs from enginering degrees taken at universities validated by the Order.

Naturally if one is at their own company, they can call themselves whatever they want, until they become invited to government and background checked on some TV channels.

Have you ever steered a HR hiring process for "software engineers" in the private sector? More often than not, HR doesn't give a rat's ass about which university or degree the candidate has, nor if he is a "proper engineer" or a janitor. What they care about is experience, reliability and how well the candidate will fit the team.

You are still confusing job titles with credentials. In a private company, you can use whatever title you want for a given role, and you can hire whoever you want for said role, barring some legal limitations of scope (eg.some documents need to be signed by certified accountants - even if the job title is "Scrooge McDuck in Chief", some documents will require a lawyer signature, even if the job title is "Major Wolf", etc). You can name the CEO role "master dictator" and no one can do anything about it. And as you already know, no one but pompous self-entitled code monkeys calls themselves the Portuguese version of "software engineer" when they describe their job.

Also, Government isn't private companies. The Government itself hires very few "software engineers", as most implementations are done by private companies. The most obvious exception is, of course, teaching - and even those rules may be easily tweaked if you are outstanding in your field, or have done outstanding work on a specific area - something that frequently requires bright minds and middle-school level skills. On a fun note, there are even some fringe cases where you can actually legally teach recognized courses (upto level 4) without any formal education in that specific field. This is often an exception - not a rule - and needs to be thoroughly documented, but perfectly legal.

I only see this kind of nitpicking and fencing on guys that come out of the academia and think that the "real world" (translation: most, but not all vacancies) cares about titles, grades and (often bad quality or irrelevant) published thesis. I'm not saying a degree isn't important - or even obligatory requirement in some cases - but those are often the exception and not the rule.