The analogy between cleaning and refactoring is useful for making the non-developers understand that refactoring is absolutely necessary. But beyond this pragmatic similarity, are the two really similar in deep and meaningful ways? I don’t think so. Refactoring is not unskilled labor. It’s a task that both requires and builds design skill and experience. While anyone can see that a floor is dirty, identifying code smells is non-obvious, tricky and demanding. This is true even of the simplest code smell, duplicated code. Although spotting code duplication is sometimes easy, at other times, the duplication is too subtle to be easily identifable. When you clean a floor, the goal is well-defined and easy to visualize. When refactoring, you may know what you’re aiming for at each small step, but just a few moves further ahead you may end up with a structure you hadn’t imagined.