from Hacker News

Cargo Cult Programming

by KiranRao0 on 2/19/25, 2:57 PM with 8 comments

• by kshahkshah on 2/19/25, 3:13 PM

  This article largely misses the cargo culty things developers do in practice - like massively overcomplicating their infrastructure using kubernetes and message busses when they've no real need.

  There is a large Venn space here with RDD, résumé driven development.

• by jdlyga on 2/19/25, 3:27 PM

  The one I see the most is "cargo cult Agile", where teams adopt practices like sprints and story points without truly understanding the values behind Agile. This often happens when people mimic what they’ve seen on other projects without fully grasping the concepts, leading to a cycle of misinterpretation. Frameworks like SAFe and even Scrum can exacerbate this by encouraging a focus on rituals over figuring things out, working together, and getting things done. As a result, organizations become bogged down by bureaucracy, excessive planning, and topdown control, all while claiming to be * Agile *. True Agile emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement, not just following rituals.

• by jagadeeshposni on 2/19/25, 3:05 PM

  this brought a gentle smile on my face and it only grew bigger as I kept reading on realising I was once a Cargo Cult Programmer(I still am when I keep for too long)

  I used to use all sorts of design patterns like Factory, Creating an interface first before implementing a service, creating package-info.java inside every package without knowing or realising the used of it. Looking back, I should have stopped and asked more questions before focussing on finishing on time.

• by cjs_ac on 2/19/25, 3:28 PM

  I found it amusing that the 'See also' section lists Github Copilot.