Concept: Cargo Cult Engineering (You Are Not Google)

In 1974, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at Caltech that described one of the strangest phenomena in anthropology.

During World War II, American troops set up airbases on remote Pacific islands. They brought cargo—food, medicine, clothing. The indigenous islanders saw this wealth arrive from the sky. When the war ended, the troops left. The cargo stopped coming.

So, the islanders tried to bring the cargo back. They carved antennas out of bamboo. They built control towers out of wood. They lit fires along the runway. They marched in formation. They perfectly mimicked the Form of an airport. But no planes landed.

Feynman called this "Cargo Cult Science": Following the precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but missing the essential integrity that makes it work.

In the technology industry, we are suffering from a pandemic of Cargo Cult Engineering.

1. The Ritual of "Scale"

The most common form of this cult is the blind imitation of Big Tech (FAANG).

A startup with 500 users and 3 engineers looks at Google and says: "Google uses Kubernetes. Google uses Microservices. Google uses a Monorepo with Bazel. If we want to be successful like Google, we must use these tools."

This is the Bamboo Airport.

• The Reality: Google uses Kubernetes because they have to manage 2.5 billion containers a week. They built Microservices because they have 30,000 engineers who can't all work in one codebase.
• Your Reality: You have 3 engineers. If you adopt Google’s complexity without Google’s scale, you don't get Google’s success. You just get a bamboo control tower that costs $20,000 a month in AWS bills.

The Executive Lesson: Do not adopt a solution until you have the problem. If you build for "Google Scale" before you have "Google Revenue," you will bankrupt the company.

2. Cargo Cult Agile (The Spotify Model)

We see the same mimicry in management. Consultants sell the "Spotify Model" (Squads, Tribes, Chapters, Guilds) to banks and insurance companies. They rename "Departments" to "Tribes" and "Managers" to "Chapter Leads." They stand up every morning for 15 minutes.

But the software doesn't get shipped any faster. Why? Because they copied the Ritual (the standup, the names), but they missed the Culture (Autonomy).

• Spotify worked because they gave Squads total autonomy to deploy code without approval.
• The Bank copies the "Squad" structure but still requires 4 layers of approval to deploy.

They built the bamboo antenna, but they didn't turn on the electricity (Trust).

3. Resume-Driven Development (The Hidden Incentive)

Why do smart engineers build Cargo Cults? It’s not stupidity; it’s incentives.

If an engineer builds a simple, boring solution (a monolith on a single server), it works perfectly. But it looks unimpressive on a Resume. If they build a complex, over-engineered solution (Serverless, GraphQL, Event-Sourcing), it might fail, but they can put those keywords on their LinkedIn.

The Moloch Connection: This is a coordination problem. The engineer is incentivized to increase their market value by using "Hype Tech," even if it hurts the company. As a leader, you must detect this. You must celebrate Boring Technology.

"Choose boring technology for everything except the one thing that makes you unique." — Dan McKinley

4. The Feynman Test

How do you know if your team is functioning like a Cargo Cult? Richard Feynman offered a litmus test: "Scientific Integrity."

"It is a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards."

Cargo Cults ignore negative evidence. Real Engineers look for it.

• The Cultist: "We need Microservices because they are scalable." (Ignores the latency, the debugging difficulty, and the infrastructure cost).
• The Engineer: "Microservices would solve our deployment blocking issue, BUT they will increase our latency by 50ms and require hiring a DevOps engineer. Is that trade-off worth it?"

Summary

The planes didn't land for the islanders because they didn't understand Aerodynamics. They only understood Airports.

In your company, stop mimicking the "Airports" of successful companies.

• Just because Netflix uses Chaos Monkey doesn't mean you should.
• Just because Amazon has 2-pizza teams doesn't mean you should.

Understand the Physics (the First Principles) of your own business. Build a solution that fits your problem, even if it looks like a boring, unsexy shed. A shed that protects you from the rain is better than a bamboo airport that does nothing.