I have a question that might resonate with other early-career SWEs. How do I become better at the "serious" parts of work?
I got a maths-heavy master's degree in computer science. Formally, I now work as a data scientist, but really, I engineer software.
I am confident in my programming abilities. I write clean code, design elegant abstractions, test everything etc. But I still feel like there's a more "serious" degree of software engineering that I find boring and I feel like I'm not great at it: Writing design documents, properly tracking decisions, careful planning, building infrastructure and deciding on expensive infrastructure projects, all sorts of compliance stuff.
My question is: As I use more and more AI to help with programming, how do I get better and find joy in the more managerial tasks of software engineering? Does confidence just come with experience? Can I get better faster? Or is it all worthless anyways and I should focus on the code?