Would you feel comfortable flying on an airplane where the programmers don’t care about secure code, correctness, or the ability to reason about and optimize algorithms—where “good enough” is the philosophy? Most people intuitively say no, because in safety-critical and large-scale systems, engineering rigor isn’t optional. Software may look intangible, but when it runs aircraft, banking systems, or global platforms, the same discipline applies.

The “Facebook/YouTube codebases are a mess so code quality doesn’t matter” line is also misleading. Those companies absolutely hire—and pay very well—engineers who obsess over security, performance, and algorithmic efficiency, because at that scale engineering quality directly translates to uptime, cost, and trust.

Yes, the visible product layers move fast and can look messy. But underneath are extremely disciplined infrastructure, security, and reliability teams. You don’t run global systems on vibe-coded foundations. People who genuinely believe correctness and efficiency don’t matter wouldn’t last long in the parts of those organizations that actually keep the lights on.