The 7 Deadly Sins of Cargo Culting
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The original cargo cult came from World War II; electric boogaloo. Pacific tribes observed cargo planes distributing supplies & food to soldiers. In short order, they began ritualistically copying military practices: marching about, building runways, and talking on fake radios. This imitation was done in the vain hope of summoning more planes, with more supplies. It’s fun to point and laugh at the silly historical tidbit, until you realise that in tech, we often do the exact same thing. “Cargo culting” in tech is when we observe and imitate the behaviour of top companies, without understanding the underlying reasoning. You know what I mean: OKRs. Dashboards. SCRUM. Story points. The behaviour is at its most insidious in the engineering department. You aren’t just cosplaying as a big Silicon Valley swingin’ d*ck, you’re actively kneecapping the productivity of your org, forever. Distributed Microservices™ is the most famous case study. Popularised by Amazon in the early 2000s (when they had billions in sales and 40m customers). At scale. Desperately imitated by companies (and sold by consultancies) with microscopic sales and nano customers. (Nah, no customers). Even Amazon is seeing the light. Complexity debt is orders of magnitude worse than tech debt, because you are paying it every time you touch your system. It’s insidious because engineers love introducing complexity. You need an iron fist to prevent them introducing the latest networking paradigm, shipping a proprietary UI rendering system, or re-architecting the app to RIBs (sorry, Alex Bush). I’m deeply impressionable, and no stranger to the allure of the cargo cult. When I CTO’d my own startup, I made the decision to roll a serverless stack so we’d scale 2 da moon 🚀, even though a $5 box could trivially handle our meagre DAUs.
Today we’re focusing on mobile engineering, because I have a lot of war stories to draw on. And we’ll cover the full roster of cargo-culting deadly sins:
👑 PrideKnowing better than Apple about UI frameworksApple gives you UIKit and SwiftUI. One’s performant, and one’s nice to write. But we want to have our cake and eat it. If we re-write the app in HypeUI, we can get blazing-fast UIKit performance with easy SwiftUI-style syntax! Kind of.
This is fun for side projects, but consider migrating your entire codebase:
Velocity suicide. This is even worse in the age of AI: perhaps you know the framework inside and out. But the training data is scarce, and your agent will start to hallucinate like it’s 2022. This is, in my experience, the deadliest sin. I’ve seen it slow feature development to a glacial crawl. If scroll performance is a problem, give UIKit a go. If it’s still a problem, simplify your UI.
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