[conkeisterdoor]

I also manage a medium sized set of ETL pipelines (approx 40 pipelines across 13k-ish lines of Python) and have a very similar experience.

I've never been in a SWE role before, but am related to and have known a number of them, and have a general sense of what being a SWE entails. That disclaimer out of the way, it's my gut feeling that a DE typically does more "hacky" kind of coding than a SWE. Whereas SWEs have much more clearly established standards for how to do certain things.

My first modules were a hot nasty mess. I've been refactoring and refining them over the past 1.5 years so they're more effective, efficient, and easier to maintain. But they've always just worked, and that has been good enough for my employer.

I have one 1600 line module solely dedicated to validating a set of invoices from a single source. It took me months of trial and error to get that monster working reliably.