Comment by steve_adams_86
1 day ago
I worked with people who would consider themselves serious, and are still in the industry and doing fine. A few have certainly gone on to be more prominent and get paid a lot more than I am—not that it's a perfect measure of seriousness.
In the early days they would often say things like "but we have prop types, why use TypeScript", "why not use JSDoc" (this made no sense at the time), or "it's an exercise in needless complexity". It was really tough to sell them on TypeScript for years.
I think there are developers who are very goal-oriented with a narrow perspective on getting from point A to point B, and their understanding of the process isn't particularly holistic, rigorous, or geared towards external or knock-on factors like maintainability, performance, bugs, etc. They deal with it when circumstances force them to, and no sooner. Defining types is a complete waste of time to someone like that.
These people thrive where teams are primarily expected to just ship things, and in my experience they often hate needing to think about things like types, tests, or code quality beyond running a linter.
So, they're serious people in one school of thought. They contribute meaningfully to projects. I think they're a large constituent of the new class of vibe coders who laugh at you if you look at the code. That's fine, they're doing their thing, and there are more than a few ways to get programs into people's hands. That way just isn't the way I like to.
Serious developers can make a serious argument that you can get quality production-level code with other ways besides explicit enforced type systems (eg. that if you have good enough test coverage such explicit type systems are a redundant waste of time).
Obviously "production quality" varies greatly from shop to shop, but I think there's more legitimacy to the idea than you're giving it.
I didn't mean to paint with such a broad stroke, there. I've worked with people who are capable of writing exceptional software without type systems or other abstractions. I'm not that smart, though. I need a lot of guard rails to keep myself from doing stupid things. I was speaking more generally about people who didn't produce exceptional code yet still weren't open to means of improving their work if it meant having to open their minds to new ways of working.
This is totally fine sometimes though, because like you say, there are shops where this type of execution is suitable. It's why vibe coding is actually okay in many cases; it's not a lot different from what it replaces in these cases. There are a lot of situations where this is the bar, it produces enough utility an value, and that's great.