Ignorance is not a defense against getting arrested. Everyone with a drivers license is expected to know all traffic laws, even brand new ones. You’re expected to know all forms of theft and violence. And then you and I are absolutely expected to understand the basics of copyright and IP laws.
Lawyering is about being able to argue case law and keeping confidences. That’s how you lose your license, is doing those two things poorly.
For ensuring legal compliance, there is a compliance department. Yes you obviously can't drive violating the traffic rules even if your boss asks you to. But regulations that apply to corporations, compliance etc are specialized laws, you don't have to know those. And it is the corporation that is acting. The individual employee who typed the Java API cloning thing in Orace v Google wasn't on the hook at any point.
There is asshole and user-hostile design that doesn't quite rise to Nuremberg levels where "I was following orders" obviously didn't and doesn't work. But below a certain level it does work.
That's not the grunts either way. At a construction site, the guy digging the hole with the excavator doesn't have to know whether all the permit paperwork is in order or not.
The guy implementing some feature doesn't have to know whether gdpr compliance will be satisfied with it or not, that's for the manager to know who orders it to go into production.
Software engineer is a fancy title but it often covers code monkeys who are more akin to the shovel guys. The guy who added the Booking.com fake flashing warnings that this room is being viewed by N people right now and other stuff (which the company got fined for) is not like some Engineer(TM) but just some web dev grunt. They can't be the one who shoulders the responsibility and indeed aren't.
Yeah you can call a degree whatever you want. You could also call the excavator operator an excavator engineer. It doesn't change their power lever inside the org.
