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cargo cult termsaying

copying the surface form of a successful practice without understanding why it works

Origin: post-WWII Pacific islanders building straw 'airstrips' and bamboo 'radios' to summon the cargo planes that had visited during the war. The form looked right; the mechanism was missing. Engineering version: a team adopts microservices because Amazon does, scrum because Google does, OKRs because every Big Tech does — without understanding the conditions that made those things work elsewhere. The 'best practice' becomes a ritual that produces effort without effect. Coined as a methodological warning by Richard Feynman ("Cargo Cult Science", 1974).

aliases: cargo-cult engineering, cargo-cult programming

references:

• Feynman — Cargo Cult Science