I’m coining a new phrase to use for discussion purposes: argumentum ad colossum.
It’s very difficult to replicate what worked for one company at another company, because culture is hard to transfer. This has been argued in business literature, e.g. Google’s OKRs and silly interviews, Amazon’s “two-pizza teams”, Netflix’s culture of radical candor, Apple’s BDFL-style leadership, Toyota’s lean manufacturing systems, Basecamp’s Shape Up. It’s hard to ackowledge that these can run counter to another company’s DNA.
In tech circles, there’s commentary about “cargo cult engineering” (scrum, SRE, fix-bugs-first), or copying methodologies. Similarly, adoption of specific architectures, technologies and design choices has been criticised. Kafka event driven architecture, microservices or monorepos, cloud deploy vs roll-your-own, Kubernetes, chaos monkey, using TLA+, adopting generative AI, and so on. You can’t transplant a technological design isolated from other factors, inconveniently. The full thinking needs to be done.
Nevertheless I hear people slipping into this line of thinking, of the form “well, if we were at X giant corporation we would just…”, including myself, and feel like I need a catchy tongue-in-cheek name, so here it is: argumentum ad colossum.