Comment by ww520
6 days ago
Vibe coding can get very far. Years ago I interviewed with a company whose business was doing price modeling on retail products. It was couple guys, who were not developers, writing some Excel VBA scripts and Access VBA scripts. They got big customers. Their system won't scale and was not robust; it's basically a proof of concept. They got tens of millions in funding. They hired a seasoned team of developers to build the real product. The project failed. They fired the team, and was interviewing me to restart. Their POC was basically vibe coding and actually got their pretty far. I didn't join because they had burnt through quite a bit of their funding, they had built the sales and marketing orgs while they didn't have a real product, they had fired the entire engineering team where all the organization knowledge had lost and it spoke of some deep distrust between engineering and the rest of the company, and their offer was completely not compelling.
Sometimes you can just smell it when companies are bad. I went into an interview at a company that they were trying to escape out if SAP hell and the two founders weren't anywhere to be seen. The kitchen looked sad. I told myself I'd probably be eating lunch there every day and the founders being absent made me realize they probably didn't give a crap about their employees. Also they had junior developer managing the paperwork and hiring process even though the senior lead dev did the real interview. Definitely a shell of a company.
This is unironically the kind of project I love. My first job was a little bit like that, and I loved being the guy who was saving the day for everyone.