4 ms·

I love this speech every time that I read it. There are a ton of examples of cargo cult thinking in the startup ecosystem. I wrote a post about this a few years

I love this speech every time that I read it. There are a ton of examples of cargo cult thinking in the startup ecosystem. I wrote a post about this a few years back: https://www.codingvc.com/p/startup-cargo-cults-what-they-are-and-how-to-avoid-them https://www.codingvc.com/p/startup-cargo-cults-what-they-are... A few examples that come to mind: * because lots of famous VCs made contrarian bets, new VCs try to be contrarian (even when a consensus point of view is clearly correct). * almost every startup I know is looking for 10x engineers, even though most startups don't need 10x engineers. We've just all been conditioned to believe that 10x engineers are required to build a great company. * generalizing the 10x example, young startups copy the traits of FAANG companies or famously successful startups, even if those traits are harmful for early stage companies. Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." Also, here's a text version of the OP that's easier to read on mobile: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

amelius 3y ago
Apple comes close to having started a cargo cult. People think that if they keep saying nice things about Apple, they will not one day lock them down hard.
- EarthLaunch 3y ago
  People aren't saying nice things about Apple to appease Apple from locking things down. People who rebelliously use non-Apple products are helping to keep the alternatives alive. It's a tradeoff of now vs future. That's the real tradeoff, it's not cults. (edits: HN vs who?)
- Drakim 3y ago
  It's more complicated than that, a lot of the people who says that Apple keeps things secure and tight compared to Android's wild west will themselves have a jail-broken iPhone. The iPhone was hot when it came out, and was a lot of people's first taste of the smartphone, and it's very easy to fall into tribalism. You and I aren't immune to it, there are hundreds of things we are irrational about in our lives. Arguments in favor of your chosen tribe are proxy arguments for preserving your own value, identity, and dignity.
  - logdap 3y ago
    Those people also forget or deliberately ignore the existence if MacOS, and generally exaggerate the state of Android. MacOS isn't locked down like iOS yet normal laypeople can use it just fine without shooting themselves in the foot. And if there is a problem with Android, it isn't ""sideloaded"" apps but rather all the shitware in Google's own appstore. None of these three are anything like the wild west that was late 90s early 00s windows. Even Windows itself isn't that way anymore.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Tech hiring practices is also a fantastic example. There was a time when companies like Google were looking for very talented CS people because they actually needed people with broad skills because in the case of G they were building a search engine and there's almost no area of computer science that isn't involved in such a project. They actually needed people with strong CS skills. Twenty years later we have positions where hires are selected for their ability to reverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard, where the position will mostly be about gluing together CRUD apps with YAML.
- shaan7 3y ago
  On a lighter note, people who can write YAML are very skilled, in my eyes. I'm yet to encounter a situation where I edited YAML and it worked on the first go -_-
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Sure it's a skill, but it's a different skill. It's like hiring a chef on their ability to sharpen a cooking knife.
- josephg 3y ago
  > Twenty years later we have positions where hires are selected for their ability to reverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard, where the position will mostly be about gluing together CRUD apps with YAML. A few years ago I worked as an interviewer for a large software engineering recruiting company. We did quantitative scoring on a lot of parts of our standardized interview. We had sections in our interview on CS knowledge, programming, debugging and whiteboard style problems. Based on the data, we asked: Could we eliminate any part of the assessment? Could we throw out the CS knowledge part without losing accuracy about the overall hireability of the candidate? Based on the data, the answer was no. The scores were all positively correlated - so CS knowledge implied you were better at programming and vice versa. But we still got extra signal by assessing candidates on their CS knowledge. Turns out even if you aren't amazing at programming, having excellent CS knowledge will still make you desirable to a lot of companies. (The weakness of this study is we didn't follow up with people. We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how well they did after they were in the door, as employees. So we might have just been mirroring the same biases the companies themselves have in their hiring processes.)

amelius 3y ago

Apple comes close to having started a cargo cult. People think that if they keep saying nice things about Apple, they will not one day lock them down hard.

EarthLaunch 3y ago
People aren't saying nice things about Apple to appease Apple from locking things down. People who rebelliously use non-Apple products are helping to keep the alternatives alive. It's a tradeoff of now vs future. That's the real tradeoff, it's not cults. (edits: HN vs who?)
Drakim 3y ago
It's more complicated than that, a lot of the people who says that Apple keeps things secure and tight compared to Android's wild west will themselves have a jail-broken iPhone. The iPhone was hot when it came out, and was a lot of people's first taste of the smartphone, and it's very easy to fall into tribalism. You and I aren't immune to it, there are hundreds of things we are irrational about in our lives. Arguments in favor of your chosen tribe are proxy arguments for preserving your own value, identity, and dignity.
- logdap 3y ago
  Those people also forget or deliberately ignore the existence if MacOS, and generally exaggerate the state of Android. MacOS isn't locked down like iOS yet normal laypeople can use it just fine without shooting themselves in the foot. And if there is a problem with Android, it isn't ""sideloaded"" apps but rather all the shitware in Google's own appstore. None of these three are anything like the wild west that was late 90s early 00s windows. Even Windows itself isn't that way anymore.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Tech hiring practices is also a fantastic example. There was a time when companies like Google were looking for very talented CS people because they actually needed people with broad skills because in the case of G they were building a search engine and there's almost no area of computer science that isn't involved in such a project. They actually needed people with strong CS skills. Twenty years later we have positions where hires are selected for their ability to reverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard, where the position will mostly be about gluing together CRUD apps with YAML.

shaan7 3y ago
On a lighter note, people who can write YAML are very skilled, in my eyes. I'm yet to encounter a situation where I edited YAML and it worked on the first go -_-
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Sure it's a skill, but it's a different skill. It's like hiring a chef on their ability to sharpen a cooking knife.
josephg 3y ago
> Twenty years later we have positions where hires are selected for their ability to reverse a red-black tree on a whiteboard, where the position will mostly be about gluing together CRUD apps with YAML. A few years ago I worked as an interviewer for a large software engineering recruiting company. We did quantitative scoring on a lot of parts of our standardized interview. We had sections in our interview on CS knowledge, programming, debugging and whiteboard style problems. Based on the data, we asked: Could we eliminate any part of the assessment? Could we throw out the CS knowledge part without losing accuracy about the overall hireability of the candidate? Based on the data, the answer was no. The scores were all positively correlated - so CS knowledge implied you were better at programming and vice versa. But we still got extra signal by assessing candidates on their CS knowledge. Turns out even if you aren't amazing at programming, having excellent CS knowledge will still make you desirable to a lot of companies. (The weakness of this study is we didn't follow up with people. We only knew if our candidates got hired, not how well they did after they were in the door, as employees. So we might have just been mirroring the same biases the companies themselves have in their hiring processes.)