[mynameisash]

Your description is pretty much spot-on.

I'm a data engineer at FAANG. I love the data scientists I work with. They are, generally speaking, crazy smart and simultaneously humble about their (in)ability to write code - they're highly specialized in ML, not so much SWE. I therefore have generally good job security working in operationalizing and optimizing their code. (Recently tweaked a script a scientist wrote and dropped runtime from 5hrs to 5min.)

If I never saw another line of Python again, I'd probably be quite happy. But I think they - and even some ML engineers I work with - love them some Python precisely because they can mash the keyboard a bit and take the shortcut to the finish line. And I don't begrudge them this at all - good on them that they can get their job done quickly! But it's a pain to make things stable and efficient.