The Cargo Cult

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

Hey friends!

You ever notice how people sometimes copy the shape of a good practice without actually understanding the reason behind it? We have a name for this phenomenon: it’s called cargo culting.

The name comes from the Pacific theater of the Second World War: throughout the region, U.S. and Japanese militaries built airstrips on occupied islands. Planes landed full of supplies. After the war the planes left, but some native islanders wanted more cargo. They observed the occupiers building the airstrips and made a logical leap to cause‑and‑effect, so they built bamboo runways, carved wooden radios, even lit fires to look like landing beacons. They outfitted platoons of friends with bamboo “rifles” and marched in close‑order drills. They did everything that looked like what had brought the cargo, but the planes weren’t coming back.

When Technologists Create Cargo Cults

I’ve encountered many examples of cargo cults in my career:

• Management announces an initiative to “be more Agile”, but as Jez Humble famously put it, “nothing changes except that we have our meetings standing up”.
• Teams adopt DevOps practices by creating a “DevOps team” instead of involving Dev in Ops and Ops in Dev.
• A requirement for test automation, static analysis, or some other development practice is announced, and the team complies, but nobody trusts the tests or the scan to release (or block) deployment pipelines.

Not all of the examples are about the software development lifecycle:

• A recent surge in companies announcing Return‑to‑Office mandates, often justified with “because other major tech companies are doing it”.
• The trend of “flattening the org” and eliminating many middle‑management positions.

I’m not here to hate on these ideas (okay, maybe I’m hating a little on RTO). The problem is that they’re implemented without reasoning or data beyond “$SOME_OTHER_COMPANY is doing it, so we need to do it as well”.

The real danger of cargo culting isn’t the bamboo runways; it’s the false sense of progress. You feel busy, you look official and professional (and maybe even knowledgeable), but nothing’s actually moving. Your organization isn’t getting measurably better, cynicism creeps in, engineering teams roll their eyes, leaders lose credibility, and even good ideas get lumped in with the failed rituals.

How to Escape the Cargo Cult

Should we never look at other organizations again? Absurd! We can adopt practices from elsewhere, but only with understanding. Here are a few quick moves that can help:

• Ask “why?” twice. If leadership rolls out a new initiative, push back and ask for the problem it’s meant to solve. If they can’t name it, you might be about to build a bamboo runway. The first “why” can be a corporate platitude; the second gets you beyond surface‑level responses.
• Run small experiments. Instead of dropping a whole framework across the organization, test one piece in a low‑stakes corner. Learn first, then scale. As a friend says, it’s like the warning on carpet‑cleaning products: “test in an inconspicuous area first”.
• Measure outcomes, not rituals. You must measure the right things! Don’t count how many stand‑ups you held; count how much faster decisions or releases happened. Don’t count closed help‑desk tickets; measure how often a change caused a failure that affected customers.
• Adapt to context. What worked at Amazon with 10,000 engineers won’t have the same effect on a team of five. Some practices will translate directly, but you need to be thoughtful, and the more disruptive the change, the more certainty you must provide that it’s needed.

Wrapping Up

Copying someone else isn’t bad. It’s how we start almost everything. Kids learn language by repeating sounds before they understand grammar. Junior devs copy Stack Overflow snippets before they grasp architectural patterns. But at some point, growth means asking why.

If all you’ve got is a bamboo rifle and a wooden radio, you’re not building an airstrip—you’re just playing soldier.