Comment by jimbo808

It's a pretty easy category to identify, some warning signs:

- You rarely write loops at work

- Every performance issue is either too many trips to the database or to some server

- You can write O(n^n) functions and nobody will ever notice

- The hardest technical problem anyone can remember was an N+1 query and it stuck around for like a year before enough people complained and you added an index

- You don't really ever have to make difficult engineering decisions, but if you do, you can make the wrong one most of the time and it'll be fine

- Nobody in the shop could explain: lock convoying, GC pauses, noisy neighbors, cache eviction cascades, one hot shard, correlating traces with scheduler behavior, connection pool saturation, thread starvation, backpressure propagation across multiple services, etc

I spent a few years in shops like this, if this is you, you must fight the urge to get comfortable because the vibe coders are coming for you.