I don't know what he was referring to specifically but I this would be the first time that I hear of a country that actually has a protected title of _Software_ Engineer.
Plenty protect "Engineer" meaning "Software Engineer" is actually a title that you _can not_ hold.
As for the "mandatory courses on algorithms" and such if you go to university, definitely Germany. If you go to university and study computer science, the first few courses which you will have to pass before ever getting to choose your own courses are going to be about modelling, data structures and algorithms. You will learn the theory of hashing, you will learn how to model problems you will learn various sorting algorithms etc. in the lecture. Labs will make you implement various of these things on an actual computer. An exam will probably ask you to write one or two of these algorithms in pseudo code. Been there, done that. And of course comparing all manner of algorithms in Big-O notation etc. Also "reducing" one algorithm onto another (dunno if that's the proper term in English). But basically taking an algorithm that you know the run time of and showing that a different algorithm you have has the same characteristics and thus Big-O complexity. You will also learn about P/NP and will implement bin packing and such.
Unrelated to hash tables but hashing always reminds me of substring search algorithms that we learned about. The naive way is to just do a "text" search, advancing one character at a time and comparing the whole thing to your substring. I don't remember what the algorithm is called or who invented it but we learned about an optimization for substring search, which hashes with a particular hash function and when advancing a character in the string to search through, you reverse the part of the function for the first character and only add the result of the function for the next character. Thus you save having to deal with the characters that haven't changed at all.
Just like hash tables or linked lists, I've never needed to code any of these ever again and I just use them, but it was definitely worth learning about all this stuff.
The respective order validates that Software/Informatics Engineering degrees are actually engineering.
Additionally, for certain legal activities like signing contracts with liability, putting the Eng. so-and-so is only legally binding if the title was validated via the traditional admission exam.
Also you can be sued if lied about having a title, although since our prime minister got away with it, and legal system takes ages, probably no one would bother unless some big loss comes to be.
