Then I started mentoring a junior staff member who worked on another project. The lead of that project was a physicist who wrote primarily in Jupyter notebooks. Like, thousands and thousands of lines of code. This junior staff member spent like 90% of her time confused and copying-and-pasting between notebooks. She had no idea what a virtual environment was and her go-to solution for solving import errors was to nuke and re-download the repo and re-run the setup script, or create a new notebook from scratch containing all the prerequisite user functions.
Was top 10 most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. I advised her immediately to stop using notebooks for development and sent her a few Python tutorials. Luckily though she just left the project and got on a better one instead.