[wiz21c]

I love software development as a creative task. It means, I love it when I do create, that is, when I make something that is the fruit of my imagination.

Development is a nightmare for me when I have to develop someone else's (i.e. my company) idea. At that point, it's not creation anymore, it's execution.

[proverbialbunny]

Me too. This is why I went into data science years ago. It's more difficult, but when correlated with difficulty you can get a good feel how creative the project is going to be.

[vharuck]

Don't you have to make analyses and reports "production quality?" I found that fun at first, but now it's annoying when 25% of my code is formatting and capitalizing.

[proverbialbunny]

No, I'm not a machine learning software engineer, so no productionization on my end. I do find paths forward for the companies I've worked at but a report usually consists of a 1-to-1 with a c-suite pitching the project. If I've written a model, the notebook speaks for itself and naturally looks glorious with plots and what not. I have been known to create power point slides or do larger presentations. It is part of the job but I've never associated the terminology "production quality" with a presentation.

>25% of my code is formatting and capitalizing.

I haven't personally used it because by default I tend to write reasonably clean code but https://github.com/ryantam626/jupyterlab_code_formatter or similar might help.