I wish the dominant metaphors weren't so business-y--they end up framing the discussion in a way that we're stuck talking about what other business-y metaphors would be better.

Explaining that doing things "bad" creates "technical debt" or "unhedged call options" I think sets us up for not being taken all that seriously because these things themselves are abstractions that we have to work hard to reason about effectively.

Is it more useful if we say something tangible--that programming is like working on a house? Imagine you just started working on updating a house last month. The owner comes to you with a request that they be able to see what's going on in the kitchen from the living room; you _could_ just knock a hole in the wall. That would satisfy the basic requirements, but it's going to make a mess, it's going to look like shit, and it may disrupt the electricity/plumbing/hvac or even the stability of the house itself. But even if we make a proper window or door between the rooms without disrupting other systems in the house and clean up our mess, it's still possible we make a door or window that is a little different than all of the other doors and windows the past builders have put in the house.

In 2 or 10 or 20 years, after several maintainers have come and gone, the owner discovers that they're being bled dry by the house's energy inefficiency. The new maintainer may go measure a window twice and get the dimensions down precisely and then count all of the windows in the house that look the same. Then they go place an order for N new energy-efficient windows. When the windows arrive and they're getting ready to replace them, they come to the terrifying realization that every window in the house is actually custom, and only a few of the windows will fit. They install the windows that fit and try to return the others only to find out the vendor charges a healthy restocking fee. Down 40% of our budget for replacing the windows but only having actually replaced 15% of them, we no longer have enough money to replace the rest. The owner decides to just use the remaining 60% to cover the increased energy costs instead of fixing the issues.

The new maintainer goes to put the diagonal blinds back up on the windows that did get replaced and discovers the custom mounting hardware has gone missing in the shuffle, so the blinds get left in the corner with a note that someone needs to find a way to put them back up when there is time and money. It's the middle of the winter anyways; the sun is always under the horizon when the owners are home. Because this is a _funhouse_, these were of course the blinds with the greatest role in reflecting summer heat, and despite the improved window technology, total energy efficiency is going to be in the shitter come summertime. For now, perhaps quixotically, energy efficiency is buoyed by the extra solar heat; the owner seems happy enough with the updates, and the metrics all show good performance.

Houses need maintenance. Things on or in them break and can't be fixed because either the parts aren't made that way anymore or the knowledge of how to fix it has eroded. They end up with empty telephone nooks and doors that were sheet-rocked over instead of being removed. A major appliance stops working and you discover the house needs infrastructure updates before a contemporary version of the same can be installed. The maintainers want to add a floor and some new rooms and they need an architect and an engineer to make sure they aren't going to ruin the roof line, slab or overload a wall. Down the road it will have different rooms built in the fashion of three decades over a span of 80 years. Further down the road a room will get sealed off when the roof caves in and the owner doesn't have the funds to fix it.