Debt is also a good metaphor because, just like finance, it can be used as a beneficial lever that propels you to the next level artificially fast, or it can be

Debt is also a good metaphor because, just like finance, it can be used as a beneficial lever that propels you to the next level artificially fast, or it can be used foolishly and end up burying your effort. I see examples of the latter all the time in the experience of developers and how they approach decisions. I have recently worked on largish (or at least in the 10s of millions of dollars of investment to create) codebases in which developers (recently - like 2013) wrote switch statements that became God classes because they simply were not familiar (at least not in practice) with patterns that avoided it. Consider that one example and imagine the type of havoc that lack of experience creates across the entire codebase. You can say this is a case of ignorance, which it is, but it's the same as the ignorance of some to handle money in a sustainable way. It's like giving a credit card to a kid.