Most companies call a significant amount of their SWE work as R&D. R&D isn’t always “inventing totally new things” but rather closer to “an investment of resour

Most companies call a significant amount of their SWE work as R&D. R&D isn’t always “inventing totally new things” but rather closer to “an investment of resources in which there is some amount of novelty and for which the outcome is uncertain”. A lot of SWE qualifies for that, even software that we’d consider fairly mundane and un-exciting.