It's actually a thing that's only close to universal for civil engineering. Electronics and mechanical engineers for aircraft, for example, are not usually lice

It's actually a thing that's only close to universal for civil engineering. Electronics and mechanical engineers for aircraft, for example, are not usually licensed in the US nor the UK, and in places like Canada where the use of the term is more heavily regulated, it had more of an impact on job titles than anything else. Like a lot of aspects of other branches of engineering, I think it's often viewed with rose-tinted glasses by software engineers. Basically everything that software engineers complain about happens with other disciplines as well!