Why don’t we think: The Dangerous Comfort of Metaphors

Metaphors are how thinking feels easy.

Factories. Gardens. Burnout. Clean code. Objects. Hustle. Each promised something. Some promised clarity. Each smuggled in assumptions. And each quietly shaped how software teams organised, worked, judged themselves — and sometimes broke. In this talk, Russ Miles (author of A Software Enchiridion) takes you on a guided tour of software’s most influential metaphors — where they came from, what they helped us see, and what they blinded us to. From industrial-age fantasies of control to pastoral dreams of cultivation; from “clean” code to thriving habitats; from burnout as personal failure to burnout as systemic (mis)design — we’ll explore how metaphors don’t just describe systems, they decide for them.

Drawing on literature, history, and painful hindsight — with a nod to Borges and his love of useful fictions — we’ll examine why metaphors are so seductive to coherence-hungry brains, and why “answers that make sense” are so often the wrong ones. In an era of LLMs acting as external coherence engines — confidently finishing our sentences and our thoughts — this talk is a call to resist borrowed thinking. To slow down. To challenge the story, not just optimise within it.

You’ll leave better equipped to spot toxic metaphors, mix metaphors deliberately, and choose cultivation over control — not as a slogan, but as an act of intellectual responsibility in software engineering.