This is not true at all, except maybe in very specific places (e.g. some jurisdictions do not allow you to call yourself an engineer without a specific qualification).
Software Engineer and Developer are essentially interchangeable terms and largely a matter of taste.
Those terms really aren’t interchangeable over here. At all. (NL). For the reasons I listed above. “Developer” (or “ontwikkelaar” in Dutch) is monkey get instructions, monkey do things. A software engineer would get a request for something, research and figure out the solution, then build it. Source: I’m a software engineer.
It may well be different in NL, I’m not going to argue with that. But ‘ontwikkelaar’ is literally a different word in a different language - no surprise that it may have different semantics to the closest word in English!
