My quintessential example of this is seeing artists create a new effect, model, or sound, and lacking the appropriate hooks in code, go into the C++ source tree and hook their assets into the game themselves.
I know a lot of people have seen that new employee manual but I assumed that only applied to the 'elite' & that there is a giant pool of peons that support them. Am I right or do the people doing things like billing and tech support get the same royal treatment?
Does everyone get to learn how to do sales, marketing, customer interaction, forcasting, and corporate financing too? Seems like they are equating "being able to code" with "being a successful entrepreneur" when it's not that at all. (See The E-Myth Revisited)
I don't mean something as structured as XML. I mean something as simple as keeping notes/numbers/links in a spreadsheet, which enforces at least some degree of information integrity (why are there a bunch of missing/ambiguous dates for these incidents?). And if it's done well, then all it takes is a simple script to parse that data into something usable, either a webpage or an interactive report.
Theoretically, it seems like you could learn to do that without learning to code. But maybe once you've learned for loops and if statements, it's much easier to understand the value of parseable documents.
*In fact, probably impossible: how often does one have to actually ask the author what they actually meant? Not appropriate for offline computer processing.
