To your question: you're extrapolating hiring practices in the USA to all companies. In the States and the UK there is no licensure for professional software engineers (with a few exceptions like Texas and Florida). So in many US companies in SV you will often encounter employees in software development and engineering roles who come from non-engineering backgrounds and are self-taught or perhaps started their careers as an apprentice, and who have industry experience instead of formal educational credentials. And most of those who do have engineering degrees aren't regulated by licensure anyway in the Anglo-American part of the industry.
This is not the case in other countries (for instance, Canada) where the industry there regulates "professional engineer"; the term "engineer" is protected by both the Engineers Act and by Section 32 of the Professional Code.