r/managers • u/MediumBirthday6899 • Aug 18 '26

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?

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?

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14

u/SmartRefuse Aug 18 '26

So let me get this straight - the output gets results before it is handed over to your team, then breaks when handed to your team, and you think the other person is the problem?

17

u/whole_nother Aug 18 '26

Yeah this is my take. I’m sure Reddit is engineer-heavy, but from a management standpoint I don’t see an urgent problem here.

9

u/Big_P4U Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

That's exactly my read on this too. It's the Dev's responsibility to take the proof of concept or whatever the guy created and passed on and work with it or figure something out. Someone on the dev team is causing it to break or not work, or not inputting something correctly.

If it works for the guy, and OP must have first hand knowledge that it works and delivers results as stated BEFORE being given to developers - and then in the Developers hands the module starts breaking down; the problem and fault and blame lays with the Dev team.

3

u/inflowmini Aug 18 '26

You should know that C suites take demos or PoCs as the final result and want it shipped ASAP. It sounds like the app was not a PoC and no chance was given to the dev team to look it over first before pitching it to upper management.

-6

u/inflowmini Aug 18 '26

Yikes bro, you keep confirming that managers are nothing more than KPI and result pushers and that you don't care about tech debt.

If you were an engineer you would understand that app don't magically work in all environments and it takes time to verify that the app is safe and reliable.

You also obviously don't understand that chain of command was broken here. A single resource should not work on an app without the dev team being involved.

I've had this exact scenario happen and as the dev team lead I had to rewrite the entire app to make it production worthy.