Cargo Cult Software Engineering (2000)

https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/cargo-cult-software-engineering/

by srirangr • 5 years ago

213 136 5 years ago

stevemcconnell.com

umvi• 5 years ago

How to make a cargo cult project:

- Read the latest AGILE books and learn how to be a scrum master

- Choose the hottest languages and frameworks as the foundation of the project

- Hire a bunch of developers with experience in those languages/frameworks

- Get JIRA and setup a sprint board

- Do a daily standup

- Figure out how Kubernetes/blockchain/marketing buzz can fit into your project to help make it more successful

- (optional) Tell devs to upgrade to even hotter languages and frameworks as they come out so that your project always uses cutting edge tech

- Wait for the airplanes to land

woodrowbarlow• 5 years ago

and the last step:

- figure out something to make

(because the what always seems to come after the how)

prox• 5 years ago

That’s simple, it’s a blockchain federated privacy hardened pandemic resistant... thing.

29athrowaway8• 5 years ago

You pick a language because:

1) You can hire people that can use it effectively.

2) It is robust, production ready.

3) Emphasizes a set of traits that you are interested in, such as productivity, performance, high concurrency, low latency, binary size, compatibility, etc.

To the clueless this may seem like bikeshedding and cargo culting, but that is not necessarily the case.

geoelectric3• 5 years ago

Now that I've been stuck actually working with agile in the field for 15-20 years, not sure I think we get to call that and Scrum cultish anymore. They're more just popular productivity footguns at this point.

29athrowaway8• 5 years ago

Scrum exists to expand scrum.

The role of scrum master is about scrum indoctrination.

The authors of scrum created that role to make the methodology viral.

The methodology is also vague enough to blame you for anything that goes wrong with it.

potta_coffee3• 5 years ago

You forgot to mention microservices brah. If your services aren't micro enough, forget about it, you aren't gonna make it.

Aperocky• 5 years ago

yep, keep burning those cloud credits, pad-left and is-odd deserve their own microservice.

luhn• 5 years ago

Microservices are dead, serverless is the future. You only pay for what you use, so when you launch and nobody cares you don't have pay anything.

random314• 5 years ago

https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

I've been there in two projects, both of which took far longer to build and neither of which ended up with anywhere near the amount of traffic or need to build things using that architecture.

That said, I had a project last year where we used a serverless platform for a product / ecommerce platform (Gatsby, Netlify, Contentful, Commercetools, JS/TS) where it worked pretty well.

jodrellblank2• 5 years ago

If the airplanes are VC monies, and those things do attract VC monies, can it really be described as a cargo cult if it works?

onlydeadheroes• 5 years ago

That is a funny question (in the good sense). I would argue the VCs are cargo culting themselves, but of course another could argue that once the VC money has moved into the pockets of the programmers, then the important part of the process is done.

I just doesn't necessarily create any useful software.

keyle2• 5 years ago

I've interviewed at a few Saas startups recently:

- React / Redux / <and everything under the sun>

- NodeJS + Typescript everything or die

- GraphQL but we don't know why

- React native because we wouldn't know what native is

- Postgres with replication and fail over for 10 concurrent users

- Docker everything on AWS <every possible keywords>

- Don't forget lambdas, but batch with Kafka first

- Route 53 just cause the name is too cool not to have it

Joking about their Angular rewrite into React is a fireable offence.

See you in 2 years. /s

iFreilicht• 5 years ago

I mean I really get why people like using npm and Typescript is great, but the whole “web-tech got adapted for backend then adapted back to web” just makes everything so unnecessarily complicated.

I think a lot of this “using frameworks without knowing why” is just because people read articles about them and how-tos and get excited too quickly, and Google just shows way more tutorials about how to do something in React than in plain JS.

What are lambdas in this context? I thought those were just another name for closures?

mlthoughts20182• 5 years ago

There are some fundamental limits to commitment-focused culture though. People have life obligations. Even if they wanted to work 60 hours a week, their sick mom or their childcare or their kitchen renovation or an especially busy graduation season for nieces and nephews just requires their time, and their knowledge that their job is secure and they won’t be penalized on raises, rewards, etc., for simply having a life.

Because of this, the commitment-focused path just doesn’t work, flat out. At best you can use it briefly to exploit unwitting young people who don’t know their worth and don’t have enough self-confidence to say no, and ride that into a pump and dump IPO situation, after which your company will promptly become process-focused and all the young people will quit and be replaced by mid-career people who don’t mind inheriting the mind-melting tech debt as long as you pay well and only expect 40 hours per week.

dboreham• 5 years ago

So much truth here.

908B64B1973• 5 years ago

There's a trick to get more out of employees that's almost never discussed: Make their life easier.

Childcare for a late meeting is an issue? Why not have childcare at the office? Pay enough and the kitchen improvements are the contractor's problem and not your employee's.

gilbetron• 5 years ago

Not having childcare is not the issue, wanting to spend times with your children is the issue. You can't outsource that.

kortilla• 5 years ago

This only works for people whose “life” only consists of chores.

Will the company pay someone else to take my wife on a 2 week romantic get away?

rightbyte• 5 years ago

Childcare at the office seems like a great way to put too many eggs in one basket. Changing child care centre is no small thing.

The simple solution is no meetings after 15:00.

allannienhuis• 5 years ago

Hey, why not have a 'company store' where people can buy everything they need right at the office instead of having to spend precious minutes travelling to some questionable generic store. Think of all the time saved. While you're at it you could even extend credit to the employees for anything they might want to buy, and have their payments come directly out of their paychecks. How convenient! You could even issue company scrip instead of dealing with the costs of payment processors. There's lots of room for innovation here!

/s :)

bluefirebrand• 5 years ago

At best you can use it briefly to exploit unwitting young people who don’t know their worth and don’t have enough self-confidence to say no, and ride that into a pump and dump IPO situation

That's basically the business plan in a lot of places.

mlthoughts20182• 5 years ago

Agreed, and we software engineers just keep letting them do it to us by agreeing that leetcode algorithm hazing should be the absolute measuring stick by which all software hiring is judged.

If you feel like you barely squeaked your way in the door as someone was whipping you and yelling “dance monkey dance” then you’re helping them identify you as a gullible goober they can pay peanuts (relative to your value add) while overworking you, and get you to thank them for the sweet ping pong and happy hours.

Until young candidates just say no to this shit, then it’s an abyss of open-office, grab-ass culture we have no one to blame for but ourselves.

antiquark• 5 years ago

When presented with more effective, new practices

Yeah but... how can you judge the actual effectiveness of some practice if it's new? There's no long-term empirical evidence to judge it by.

cle• 5 years ago

I don't think the author is trying to say "don't try anything new unless you have evidence", but "don't use something without understanding why". Experimenting with a practice to understand it better is a perfectly valid reason. Adopting a practice and expecting it to magically solve your productivity problems, without understanding why and whether the tradeoffs are appropriate, is not a valid reason...that's cargo culting.

Another way to look at it is...what are your expectations? If you are using something with the expectation that it'll magically solve your problems, and you don't really know why...you're cargo culting. If you're using something and suspecting that it'll solve your problems, and you expect to watch it and gather feedback and evidence on whether it's actually helping or not, and potentially axe it in the future if it's not working out...that's not cargo culting at all, but effective process.

Jtsummers8• 5 years ago

Experiment. If you desire evidence-based management, you have to seek out case studies (and actually consider them, not discard them when brought to you like one manager did to me, "Show me the evidence." "Ok." "Whatever") or run your own experiments. Even if you do seek out case studies, you will still want to run your own experiments because what works for X may not work for you.

Find a low impact project or a project that can absorb a potential setback and try it out. If it fails, you at least gave it a shot. If it succeeds, promote the idea among other teams and projects. You can always apply a sanity check on ideas before trying them, just like in other things.

"I heard that having a foosball table in offices increases productivity by 25%."

"That doesn't sound right, but we can try to create better break areas."

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

Find a low impact project or a project that can absorb a potential setback and try it out.

That's how I introduce every new thing to the companies I've worked for. Use it in a non critical project first. The problem with using a new thing is a critical project is if anything goes wrong the company hive mind will scapegoat the new thing and you.

Jtsummers8• 5 years ago

This is a good article, written in 2000. I think it was my introduction to the term "cargo cult" way back when.

We call the imposter organizations sweatshops because they emphasize working hard rather than working smart

I wrote on a whiteboard at an office, early in my career, "Company motto: Work harder, not smarter" out of frustration following a meeting with a manager where that phrase was nearly stated verbatim. I had thrown in a ton of OT getting things working (I was young), including a nearly 36-hour run (7am Monday to 6pm Tuesday, with a few hours off for lunches, dinner on Monday, and a trip home to shower and change Tuesday morning). The OT was worth it, I fixed the thing that was blocking us and I set it up so that we wouldn't have that issue in the future. I identified various areas where procedural improvements would reduce our error rate in cases where we had repeatedly run into the same issue (or similar issues with a common root cause), and it was discarded by this manager with something like the above motto and "We don't do that here". This meant that I was going to get lots more OT (yay money!) but I just wanted to sleep at night again.

devlopr• 5 years ago

I send in my procedural improvement reports and always assume they will get ignored. Rarely do I get surprised.

_jal• 5 years ago

Process improvements are typically valued at zero unless and until a director (or above) is annoyed by the issue addressed or, worse, their bonus may be impacted.

lumost• 5 years ago

Many engineers/Creative professionals chafe at being told how to work, so they will resoundingly push back on any procedural change. Usually you'll find that as an individual contributor you have wide latitude to develop in any manner you see fit as long as you earn the trust of your manager and can satisfy his leadership's tracking requirements.

On paper I often work in a scrum team, in practice I subdivide my own work along arbitrary story guidelines to make sure that at the end of the spring I have the requisite number of points + 20% on average. If someone else needs to pick up some work, I'll slice off a whole workstream for them - and then we'll subdivide the workstream to have the requisite number of points + 20% for them as well. I've worked in agile shops for 8 years at this point, and this approach has yielded the best results for both myself and the company - but "not using scrum/agile" is a great way to be viewed as rocking the boat in an unhelpful manner.

chartpath• 5 years ago

I still do this after 15 years! Commitment means creative autonomy though. If valid solutions get tossed out by impostors then it becomes impossible to sustain. Or when authoritarians and people low on agreeableness traits start trying to make everyone predict all implementation details up front under the guise of process improvement (it allows unexperienced managers to pretend they understand details).

There is a minimum level of mutual co-operation and diplomacy required to nurture commitment and ownership, and alas it seems so uncommon as soon as a team goes over 5 people IME, unless the business is REALLY careful about hiring for openness and agreeableness.

cutemonster6• 5 years ago

authoritarians and people low on agreeableness

Is that the big five personality traits? Seems as if in your experience they mean something for workplace performance and team efficiency?

openness and agreeableness

Tends to create better teams?

How come you've heard about the big five? (You didn't study psychology?)

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

Lords don't like serfs who go about shrinking their fiefdom with efficiency measures. That just embarrasses them in front of the other lords.

Jtsummers8• 5 years ago

I left my last job for many reasons, but fiefdoms were one of the big ones. I had a manager, when I brought up increasing automation in testing, say: But then what would the testers do?

My answer was: Automate more tests and test more systems, no one is being let go but now we can do more across the team and organization.

The threat of losing personnel though, to a reorg as the needed numbers changed, was enough to stop managers from doing things that would improve their product and the quality of life of their teams. It was pathetic.

gowld4• 5 years ago

A smart manager would use the free time to quietly pay his staff to invent something new and useful and then pitch it upstairs to grow his fiefdom.

cutemonster6• 5 years ago

Wow. Thanks for that comment -- there're so many counter intuitive things to learn about the humans and how they do things.

Whilst at the same time I'd suppose such extremely short-sighted selfish lords are at least a bit rare, also among the humans.

nelsonenzo• 5 years ago

Neither approach is wrong when used correctly! What a wonderfully written article.

I feel like 98% of articles and opinions in popular media could learn a lesson from this articles template. So often folks are busy arguing the obvious extremes that they completely miss the point of what actually matters.

satya71• 5 years ago

Article from 2000. Still seems relevant

908B64B1973• 5 years ago

Selective cargo culting is great.

I recall talking to someone who was very very happy to brag that his company was doing "everything just like Google" and following the exact same practices he read the company did on various engineering blogs.

I asked him what was the compensation like and how he managed to get kids from Stanford to work at his company instead of their startups and he just gave me a blank stare. Said something about how they were not in Silicon Valley and paid median salaries and that he had "no trouble finding Google caliber talent in the local market." and that "it's not really the local market's customs to give stocks to coders".

jimbob45• 5 years ago

In fairness, cargo culting can be good in very targeted ways.

My company didn't have a clue on what to purchase for software development equipment or how to organize it. As a result, they observed what Google did and copied it to the best of their ability as their pocketbook would allow. Although it's not perfect and they have no idea why it works, it's certainly better than anything they could organically have come up with.

the-dude4• 5 years ago

Are you talking about computers or chairs and desks?

yks2• 5 years ago

I don't understand your point, you don't need "kids from Stanford paid in stock" to run a monorepo, k8s (borg), bazel (blaze), SRE and whatever else you can read on the blogs. That's literally the point, to spread ideas around the industry so everyone can try them out.

Now I would understand the complaint if that company had the same hiring hoops as Google but a dud of TC but that's an orthogonal issue.

georgeecollins• 5 years ago

I think the point the author was trying to make was that the example company was doing “everything like Google” EXCEPT being as picky about who you hire, paying as much, and aligning employees with stock options.

If you try to bake a cake following a recipe, but only using half of the ingredients listed, you are going to get an odd cake.

renewiltord• 5 years ago

Well, isn't that the magic of picking the right tooling? You then don't need superstars to operate the system. That sounds like a productivity coup. It is, natural, of course that the productivity accrues to capital rather than to labour in this relationship.

29athrowaway8• 5 years ago

Does your company maintain operating systems, compilers, web browsers, libraries for cryptography, machine learning, compression, etc?

Do you have services used by billions of people that process petabytes of data every day?

If not, you do not need Google caliber engineers. You need common sense.

gowld4• 5 years ago

Google also makes a bunch of webapps and phone apps.

flukus• 5 years ago

I used to work for a CEO who was always going on about "we're going to be the google of x". No 20% time, no food provided, low pay, horrible management and would hire any random contractors that applied, but we had an xbox we were allowed to use after work "just like google". Half a billion dollars later they failed to be the ask jeeves of x.

The other big cargo cult you often see is agile. Press an "agile" company on what agile practices the follow and more often than not you'll just get "we do daily stand ups". Ask them what they think the most important rule in the agile manifesto is and you'll get blank stares, they can't even read the cults literature.

walshemj• 5 years ago

"coders" is just such a red flag here

jojobas• 5 years ago

If it's selective then it's not cargo culting.

higerordermap2• 5 years ago

Micro cargo culting.

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

I think for most cases "google calibre talent" is overrated. Most companies run fine on 87 octane.

sk5t• 5 years ago

I'm reasonably certain you're describing a delusional or deeply ignorant person--not someone who actually follows meaningful Google-esque practices of any sort. "We use Guava and are looking into Go"-level overlap with Google and not much more.

sidlls• 5 years ago

We should be debating process versus commitment, though. “They can both work” is a bit facile.

Work isn’t (typically) done except in the context of workers’ lives. These paradigms incentivize different behaviors and cultures and there are real impacts on the lives of workers as a result. It’s a mistake to purport that we can ignore those consequences in an evaluation of what works.

sgt1012• 5 years ago

I agree, but also consider the choice of the worker. Commitment comes from motivation; the motivation can have a very large impact. A friend of mind went to work for Google, did 5 years as a Senior, got a load of cash, married his dream girl from high school back home and is now traveling the world with her. This is his idea of heaven. Personally I would never have committed like he did; but this is my choice. The problem comes when people are lied to and bullied into doing things that they don't want to with no positive outcome for them.

Jtsummers8• 5 years ago

I think one of the points in the conclusion is that these two ideas aren't actually on a spectrum, but rather are more orthogonal with each other. It's not a true binary choice so there isn't a real debate to be had between the two. Process doesn't preclude (though it may constrain) individual empowerment, and individual empowerment does not preclude (though it may constrain) process.

There are processes which actually do, to some extent, encourage individual empowerment. I would put the trend to distributed version control systems like git as a boon to both process and individual empowerment, as an example. I can use it much more freely to experiment in my feature branch than when using a system like SVN (in many classical scenarios of using SVN), but the pull request system integrated into many git server systems is itself a process approach to control (and hopefully improve) the development work.

InfiniteRand• 5 years ago

On a tangent, Cargo Cults in the Pacific are a more complex phenomenon than many people assume.

I remember in college I had a great Pacific studies professor and one of the topics he touched upon was the idea of cargo cults as a form of disruptive political protest. I forget the details of his argument, but I think this article captures the gist of it - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/1959-cargo-cults-...

I also think there was an element of trying to play Americans off of other colonial powers, although I can't find any citation for that.

Interesting to note that at least one cargo cult made the transition into an actual political party - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagriamel

QuercusMax• 5 years ago

Fantastic SciAm article - thanks for sharing! Really interesting, especially having been written 62 years ago!

tantalor• 5 years ago

Popular science and culture have made a "cargo cult" out of the term "cargo cult".

mr_toad2• 5 years ago

The Whites, who possessed the secret of the cargo, were intercepting it and keeping it from the hands of the islanders, to whom it was really consigned.

Replace “whites” with “establishment” and “cargo” with jobs and “the apocalypse” with revolution and you have the essence of a conspiracy theory or extreme political movement.

Edit: this next bit is disturbingly prophetic:

Of course the cargo never comes. The cults nonetheless live on. If the millennium does not arrive on schedule, then perhaps there is some failure in the magic, some error in the ritual. New breakaway groups organize around "purer" faith and ritual. The cult rarely disappears, so long as the social situation which brings it into being persists.

biztos• 5 years ago

It would be fun, and maybe evil, to go drop some actual cargo in a place with a cargo cult.

Say a dozen crates of stuffed Pokémon toys and one crate of carabiners.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

This is really more "cargo cult software engineering management".

Cargo cult software engineering is also a thing: Patterns (chosen without knowing when to use them or why). OO vs FP (picked without knowing when to use which, and why). Languages and frameworks (chosen without knowing when to use which, and why).

tra3• 5 years ago

Steve McConnell is great. Of the "Code Complete" fame. I recently read his "More effective agile" and it's a great modern introduction to Agile. Lots of actionable advice.

okl2• 5 years ago

His "Software Project Survival Guide" is great too, a bit dated but a great read. Saved more than one project that was close to the abyss when I joined.

zabzonk• 5 years ago

Better than ""Code Complete" in the context of this post - "Rapid Development". Probably the best book on software project management I've read.

tempodox• 5 years ago

… we should be looking for ways to raise the average level of developer and manager competence.

Ha, I wish! The vast majority of companies I worked for never wasted a thought on this. It seems clear to me that there is much room for improvements on that axis, irrespective of organizational style.

gonzo41• 5 years ago

I think you're wrong. Most companies would run out of effective work for better staff. Rather than drive innovation and develop new competative advantages with it, they just want the status quo. So mediocre employees and managers make sense. They don't rock the boad.

sorokod• 5 years ago

Reminds me how some children play chess by mirroring the moves of the oponent. It sort of works up to a point.

blaufast• 5 years ago

Isn't the whole appeal of this kind of article that you get to believe you are an insider to 'correct' knowledge?

kerblang• 5 years ago

these organizations look at successful companies like Microsoft

Except they don't anymore, because nobody worships at the altar of Microsoft, because while they were once revered as Gods, they no longer are. Now substitute Google, Tesla, etc...

The tech industry would advance faster if we paid more attention to technology than market dominance.

Jtsummers8• 5 years ago

The publication date for the article is in 2000. Take "like" and extrapolate to today, you don't actually seem to be disagreeing with the author under that view.

okl2• 5 years ago

It's from 2000.

jayd16• 5 years ago

Is the business goal technology or market dominance?

amelius• 5 years ago

We're heading towards an era of cargo cult where Apple's silicon is viewed as pure magic and developers scratch their heads over why they are now paying 60% to be in the App Store considering that they are doing the exact same things as when the rate was still 30%.

simonh• 5 years ago

Right now a lot of small dev shops are wondering why they are paying 15% when the rate used to be 30%, so you're almost right (factor of two) just in the wrong direction.

harry8• 5 years ago

Anyone who hasn't read Feynman's original speech or just hasn't re-read it for a couple of years:

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

For mine, it is one of the great pieces of writing/oratory of the last couple of hundred years and addresses so many of today's issues head on. It would be nice if it became very dated, let's work on that.

seepel• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I hadn’t read that before, that was a great read.

cutemonster6• 5 years ago

It was indeed :-)

rajacombinator• 5 years ago

Can we start calling this Agile Culting?

srirangr• 5 years ago

Cargo Cult Agile is a thing. A simple Google search will give you lots of perspectives on how many people have suffered because of the same :)

Cargo Cult Software Engineering (2000)

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