Cargo Cult

My team lead explained this term to me today. Supposedly as white people conquered various remote locales (Hey, it's what we do and it is what God and the crown want, right?) we would set up shop amid people who had not seen outsiders, bring in goods on cargo aircraft, do our thing, and eventually leave. When the outside world eventually reached back to the isolated world again it found that the isolated were building effigies of planes out of bamboo and what not as that was associated with prosperity and good times without the context to know of how poorly a fake plane serves the role of mirroring a real plane bringing in cargo to the island or wherever it was. I once saw David Cassidy on TV venting of how he wished he could talk the writers of Partridge Family into doing something different while he was on the show and the pushback was always "You don't change a winning play." which explains the cargo cult mindset in software too. It is a pit of attempting to do what others deem wise and not Kaizen, in contrast, for example. There is a certain individual who would drop this term all the time in Twitter attacks on a certain company and I won't mention either entity by name but now I know what he meant. His attacks seem unfair. That company was constantly trying new things.