This is what you can find on the wikipedia entry on engineers [0]: > The foundation education of an engineer is typically a 4-year bachelor's degree or in some

This is what you can find on the wikipedia entry on engineers [0]: > The foundation education of an engineer is typically a 4-year bachelor's degree or in some countries, a master's degree in an engineering discipline.. I would add further that, following the above, a software engineer is someone who has a formal higher education in engineering applied to the design and implementation of software systems. Under these definitions, a developer without formal university education is not a software engineer, although he may be technical competent to design and implement software systems. In a nutshell, the difference is not on "competence" or "skills" but the lack of formal education.. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer