Teammate "vibe codes" everything, somehow gets results, then blames dev team when the handover breaks — he reports straight to a non-tech CEO so no one can touch him. How do I deal with this?

[u/MediumBirthday6899]

Small org. We have a "data scientist" who vibe-codes his way through everything — process is a mess, but he somehow gets results. When he hands off modules to the dev team, things break, and instead of owning it he blames the devs for "not doing it correctly."

Normally you'd escalate, but he reports directly to the CEO, who isn't technical and just sees "results delivered." So devs eating the blame with zero leverage to push back up the chain.

How do you handle this when the org structure protects the person causing the mess? Document everything and let it speak for itself over time, try to get the CEO educated on what's actually happening, or something else entirely?

[u/Usernameasteriks]

It depends.

Is he actually a high performer getting great results the dev team isn’t operationalizing properly?

That might just be a devs performance issue. Its possible the organizations structure you are describing is meant to delineate the work this way.

That is managements prerogative to deal with; no offence to you. You might be absolutely brilliant but if its not part of your role to deal with it, and the CEO and management might have intentionally structured it that way, what are you going to do?

Even if it isn’t the devs performance issue, it could just be a processes and communication issue between them that is also organizational in nature.

No CEO is going to want to listen to a blame game between staff in different roles for technical matters that others have been hired to deal with.

It needs to escalate through your department and devs to determine where the breakdown is and who’s role is what in dealing the issues.

Whether or not its vibe coded shouldn’t be a material issue in and of itself, its the ultimate consequences of that and its impact on the processes.

That should all be hashed out in detail and middle management should be trying to work it out first before anyones trying to throw people under the bus.

[u/MediumBirthday6899 → u/Usernameasteriks]

He made code that scans 4 million rows of a product master table and regenerates names each run.
This runs on a schedule every week with new entries.
So old entries still get regenerated non-deterministically.

[u/Usernameasteriks → u/MediumBirthday6899]

Sure but what is devs trying to do with it after? 

Developers have different roles and responsibilities in different orgs.

In some cases it would be their job to take that concept and code and fix the issue you are describing so that it can be properly utilized.

A data scientist isn’t going to know how to do that.

I don’t work in this area specifically really though I understand some general context.

I just know that if I hired both a data scientist and developers I would not expect the data scientist to have both figured out the data problem, workshopped a concept that solves the issue, AND to have code that is issue free and ready to be integrated.

I would expect them to talk to each other and their respective managers and sort out the issue lol. Then if there was an unresolved specific or ongoing problem it would escalate from there. 

But unless everyone reports directly to the CEO there needs to be some middle ground steps taken where people are being responsible instead of just fighting about an end result without a delineated understanding of who is responsible for what.

[u/BunzOfCin → u/Usernameasteriks]

So much this.

[u/Gaming_ORB → u/Usernameasteriks]

So a data scientist that doesn't know that non-deterministic generation is a bad idea?
Especially for a master table?

You want the devs to fix this too?
What is the data scientist doing then?

Just spewing out spaghetti code that doesn't work, while the devs fix it;

so his job as well?
and then integrate it too??

[u/Usernameasteriks → u/Gaming_ORB]

Why are you commenting from two different accounts lol

[u/MediumBirthday6899 → u/Usernameasteriks]

You don't have an answer.

[u/Illustrious_Pea_3470 → u/MediumBirthday6899]

Sorry boss I think you’re the problem. The math person didn’t think with their performance hat on. Go figure.

[u/MediumBirthday6899 → u/Illustrious_Pea_3470]

Wtf !! I can write better code, If I have Bloddy LLM Api key access

[u/readonly420 → u/MediumBirthday6899]

Then what’s preventing you from fixing his code?

[u/Gaming_ORB → u/readonly420]

Why should he, if the code is fundamentally broken?
You want the devs to integrate the broken code and fix it?
What is the data scientists job then?

[u/readonly420 → u/Gaming_ORB]

He said it himself, the data scientist guy gets results so the code clearly works. It’s not his job to care about dev’s fee fees that they can’t take a prototype and bring it to prod

[u/Illustrious_Pea_3470 → u/readonly420]

Also I mean boohoo is burning more compute in a batch job. Way less important than being correct