I made a very similar transition four years ago. Finished a Ph.D. Started a job in a related field writing lots of Python. My advice is to take advantage of

I made a very similar transition four years ago. Finished a Ph.D. Started a job in a related field writing lots of Python. My advice is to take advantage of your analytical and abstract reasoning skills. Your peers may have more concrete experience writing software, but you did a Ph.D., which means you have the patience and tenacity to follow all the threads until you figure out where they go. That means that where other people might give up, you can actually figure out how the system works and where a new feature fits in it. Or why it doesn't work the way anybody thinks it does. Think of reading other people's code like doing a lit review -- multiple authors, different schools of thought, arguments about how to do things right -- these have all played out in the code base and they're there for you to read. As a Ph.D., you have the ability to pull this all together into something that makes sense.