When someone tells me they're an engineer I ask about how hard the PE was. That's when you find out if someone is an actual engineer from a legal perspective or just affixing the term to themselves.
I've had the title Software Engineer more than a couple times. Each time I've joked with my boss and fellow employees that we're not actual engineers. The funny thing is both times it was at an actual engineering company having PEs - so you'd think they'd be more careful with that title!
PE essentially just means you can legally sign off on safety critical designs. Engineering is the application of math and physics to solve a problem.
Anecdotally, the handful of PEs I know are the pencil-pusher types. They're engineers on paper, but a critical skill for engineering is actually building stuff.
[0]: https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/ [1]: https://ncees.org/exams/fe-exam/
I'd be down with the creation of the role of software engineer, a bona fide engineering degree, having licensure similar to the PE. In fact, given how much software is running our lives, I'd say such licensure is long overdue.
Seriously though, the biggest problem is separating knowledge of programming languages and libraries from actual software engineering. The challenge there is we don't have a good definition of software engineering and how we'd go about doing that. I think it'd be a great start if, as an industry, we actually sit down to figure out what software engineering is.
https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...
The part about needing to take the FE before the PE is correct though.