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Comment by herodoturtle | Hacker News Reader

Side note - for those HN readers like me who had never heard this term "Cargo Cult" before, here is a quick Wikipedia definition:

> A cargo cult is a millenarian belief system in which adherents perform rituals which they believe will cause a more technologically advanced society to deliver goods. These cults were first described in Melanesia in the wake of contact with allied military forces during the Second World War.

Personally, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the implied context here.

Sorry it's slightly off topic - but perhaps someone can clarify?

Thanks :)

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It's a bit of a weird one! I think the most famous example of the term comes from Richard Feynman, in his essay "Cargo Cult Science" (http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm):

> In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.

It's about copying others to achieve a goal — but because you aren't copying the motives, only the visible methods, you don't succeed. In this case, it's about copying the engineering practices of big organisations without being a big organisation yourself, in the hope that you become one. Hope this helps.

This is also almost my first time that I've heard about "cargo cult" and that does sum up nicely a lot of things I've seen at my place.

I hope this is a valid example?

1. Project P fails spectacularly, really bringing the reliability targets of the whole production down. In reality we don't have proper targets, we have "100% reliability" target, but still, it was below 98.5% judging by my calculations which was unacceptable.

2. Management furious at that time. The team in charge of that project promises that they are going to regroup, start doing "retros", using "planning poker", and introduce more alerts (to some other team of course...) etc

3. Management gives them another (n-th) chance because the tools sound cool and think that employing "technology" will always fix social problems.

That definitely helps - I understand the reference perfectly now - thanks :)

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