I honestly make terrible automotive analogies. Most people I talk to have driven a car or have at least ridden in one, so it's a good basis for shared understan

I honestly make terrible automotive analogies. Most people I talk to have driven a car or have at least ridden in one, so it's a good basis for shared understanding. Making the analogies obviously bad shows that programming is subject to human faults and conveys that programmers aren't necessarily smarter or better than anyone else. We're just as liable to misunderstand things or make mistakes, and that's a useful piece of information for non-developers, who tend (in my experience) to regard developers as wizards. Correcting my terrible analogies is an object lesson in the software development process, too.