[jholman]

In Canada, representing yourself as an "Engineer" is like representing yourself as a "Doctor". There's a professional organization that gets to say who is and is not a member. That includes "software engineer" (it does not include train engineers, btw). There are, I think, a number of legal privileges and responsibilities that come with that. I dunno, I'm not an engineer.

This has almost nothing to do with "software engineering" in practice, except that in Canada we generally call the people who write software "developers" (or "coders" or "programmers"). If a given company calls their developers "engineers", it's code for "we're an American company (and we don't respect the law (until APEG sues us))".

[type0]

Do you mean basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Science_in_Engineeri... ?

Canada is not on the list so that's why I'm asking.

[jholman]

I do not. That article, which is remarkably poorly written, has very little to do with what I'm talking about. I don't know how to concisely be a lot clearer than what I said.

Look, in Canada, as in the U.S., and to the best of my knowledge in most jurisdictions, there is a concept of professional accreditation. There are "professional organizations" that have memberships, and obviously the ruling on who is and is not a member is determined by the organization, which is all pretty normal. What's interesting is that national law enshrines certain branding around that organization. For example, in most countries, calling yourself a "doctor", without any justification, is a crime. In particular, representing yourself as a medical doctor, in a way which might mislead lay people, is "practicing without a license". In Canada, representing yourself as an "engineer" has similar rules around it. Compare with e.g. the UK situation, in which the word "engineer" itself is not legally protected, but if you call yourself a "Chartered Engineer" without the permission of Engineering Council UK, that's a crime.

To learn about the education process of an engineer, perhaps read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en... , a much more useful article than what you linked.

Almost completely unrelatedly, most academic disciplines that have related professional programs, such as medicine or law, have more than one stream of post-graduation education. One stream is intended to be primary or supplementary education for working practitioners in the field, the other for academic study in the field. For example a LL.B. (a.k.a. a J.D., as title inflation is commonplace) is typically taken after some kind of bachelor's degree, but is really more like a second bachelor's degree than it is like an M.A. or M.Sc. or Ph.D. or any other academic master's degree. If you want to do such an academic track, you might take a B.A., then an LL.B./J.D., then perhaps an LL.M. or LL.D. or Ph.D. in law. That's one bachelor's degree, one professional degree, and two academic graduate degrees.

Back to Engineering, one might take a B.Sc. (or B.Ap.Sc. or whatever) in Engineering, perhaps certify to become a professional engineer, and then one might choose to take additional formal education. If one is professionally-oriented, some schools might offer a professionally-oriented Master's degree for you. That is different from an academically-oriented Master's, and each school that offers both will have some way of disambiguating them, which is probably not fully standardized from school to school, even within Canada (or any other jurisdiction). Perhaps call one a Master's of Engineering, and the other a Master's of Science in Engineering, whatever. That's what your article was alluding to. As for its list, it only (non-exhaustively) lists countries with equivalent degrees by other names.

All of this stuff about graduate degrees is irrelevant to jrm2k6's comment and my reply thereto. jrm2k6 was mentioning that regulation about the word "engineerig" is stricter in Canada, and my reply was that that's mostly not relevant to the practice of those who write software.