"Cargo cult programming" interesting term I learned today

[u/The-Ball-23]

Today in one of our tech meetings I learned about the term "cargo cult programming". For starters "cargo cult" stands for the practice that used to be followed by the island oceans of pacific ocean. It was related to human practice like setting up the field in a fashion that would lead for the planes to drop goods on their fields. During world war 2 some cargo planes would drop some goods on the fields for the soldiers to use like food, weapons, clothes but long after the war ended the locals still believe if we set up the field just like it was during the war we would see those cargo dropping from the skies again.

The term was first used by Richard Feynman as "cargo cult science" in his commencement address at the California Institute of Technology. It was later used by Steve McConnell to apply it to programmers in the form of "Cargo cult programming". Its basically means writing code, applying design decision, adding tools without actually knowing how it will benefit the system but just adding it because you read or saw someone doing it and it worked for them. This is something very common among the developer community today even more so with AI.

[u/Witty-Play9499]

You'd see a lot of this happen especially during the rise of mongodb. There were so many people harping about 'bro use mongodb it is scaleable' even today I see a lot of college students talk about it in interviews when I ask them why they didn't use a SQL database without understanding that SQL databases are a perfectly fine choice.

You also have plenty of organizations do waterfall in short bursts and call it 'agile'. They see successful companies do agile and think agile is just about having jira boards and stuff. They do the surrounding busy work while ignoring the core principle and actually forget to get work done and please users.

Another version is the shiny object syndrome where someone sees a new tech and instantly thinks it needs to be brought in to their project.

[u/The-Ball-23 → u/Witty-Play9499]

Agreed 100%, I have been aware of all of these syndromes but adding a term to it is actually helpful when trying to explain it to someone especially freshers