I see people here saying research is like writing software with fast-changing requirements. I can see how that could seem like an adequate analogy to a software

I see people here saying research is like writing software with fast-changing requirements. I can see how that could seem like an adequate analogy to a software engineer, but it's not. Researchers use code as a tool of thought to make progress on very ambiguous, high-level problems that lack pre-existing methodology. Like, how could I detect this theoretical astrophysical phenomenon in this dataset? What would it take to predict disease transmission dynamics in a complex environment like a city? Could a neural network leveraging this bag of tricks in some way improve on the state-of-the-art? If you have JIRA tickets like that in your queue, maybe you can compare your job to that of a researcher.