> Writing design documents, properly tracking decisions, careful planning, building infrastructure and deciding on expensive infrastructure projects, all sorts of compliance stuff.<p>These are important skills as a data scientist as well and as such shouldn't be new for you. I'm not sure what sort of strategy you've been employing to get any serious data science work done.<p>> how do I get better and find joy in the more managerial tasks of software engineering?<p>Maybe you don't and that is okay. You don't have to find every single part of software engineering joyous. This goes for non-managerial work as well. Not all problems are blessed with being fun. Just do it regardless.<p>> Does confidence just come with experience?<p>Yes.<p>> Can I get better faster?<p>Yes. You get faster at any task you repeat often enough.<p>> Or is it all worthless anyways and I should focus on the code?<p>Some of it, maybe, maybe not. You'll know what kinds of non-programming activities help your programming after trying them out for a while. I for example don't love design documents for every little mundane feature. However, for larger, complex tasks the act of writing <i>something, anything at all</i> helps me bring clarity to my thoughts. I've also found development diaries extremely useful for any project where I go more than a week between development sessions. The important point is that I found this out by testing it out and reflecting on my experience and/or results.

Do the boring parts first. I mean this seriously. You need to build personal routines of accomplishment for the more administrative tasks. Some of that can be worked in parallel with other things.

Don't use AI.