People aspiring to work in information technology may think they just need to learn to read and write software, learn databases, networking, operating systems, and similar. They may overlook how important literary tools are to the above.

Metaphors are everywhere in IT. It’s a crucial part of the language and context around the things we use and do. Understanding them, the history of the original, and the implications to our IT language are important.

1. We use metaphors to explain things. Calling the Internet an information superhighway attempted to use the idea of how cars and trucks move on interstates and freeways to simply explain what the Internet did. Data mining uses the concepts of extracting coal for extracting data.
2. Which leads to: We tend to re-use nouns as proper nouns to brand. A proper noun for a thing helps understand it without needing an explanation. The service named Dropbox helps understand what it should do without an explanation. Harvard dormitories used face books for residents to know who lived there, so Zuckerberg named it Facebook after them. In the dotCom boom and still today, having to explain a new service could kill it before it can take off.
3. And… We use metaphors in proper nouns to understand new IT concepts. What is a server? A device that receives a request and provides back, aka serves, data. We named it server as a metaphor for the concept of what it does.
4. Extending metaphors helps in explaining the evolution of technology. A recent phenomenon are data lakes, where we comingle the data for various databases, to make it easier to query them in one place rather than having to extremely inefficiently join them across multiple systems. To extend the metaphor, I keep seeing data oceans as well. These extensions are intentional making it easier to market a new technology.
5. They also permeate our aphorisms. “Garbage in; garbage out.” or “Free as in a free puppy.”

Basically, my point is the more well read, exposed to language, and understanding of metaphors, allusions, and references, the better someone will do in IT. It will be easier to understand the concepts conveyed by unfamiliar references.

I am reminded by my first CIO on Friday afternoons after the offices closed chatting with me about something he read in a trade magazine getting the thoughts of the most junior staff member (me) on them. I wasn’t necessarily familiar with the specifics of something in an article, but I could sense what something should be to ask him pertinent questions which he would look for in the article to better understand it himself. These conversations prompted me to subscribe to these magazines and get a head start on his questions to where I could go into them opinionated. In retrospect, I probably was better off just relying on the tools of language instead of putting my name out there to where my name was sold to thousands of companies.