

Everyone at Yipit is Now Learning to Code - vacanti
http://viniciusvacanti.com/2013/02/07/everyone-at-yipit-is-now-learning-to-code/

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endianswap
This is basically how things work at Valve, since it's almost entirely an
engineering driven system that keeps us moving forward. Therefore there's
always incentive for anyone in any non-engineering department to pick up what
they can to make their work easier or more efficient. Of course the converse
is true, too, you see engineers learning more about the art pipeline,
business, et. as part of the concept of wanting to become more T-shaped.

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.

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juan_juarez
Everyone?

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?

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endianswap
For example, the support team has internal tools that they use to do their
job, and for the most part do all development of that tool themselves.
Sometimes other developers help them out with specific features that are in
the domain of that developer, but most of the tool grows as the support team
needs e.g. better wizards to answer tickets quicker. Several members of the
support team are taking programming classes, too, to learn how to do more
developmental work along these lines.

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rpwilcox
> One of the core tenants at Yipit is that everyone should think and act like
> an entrepreneur.

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_ )

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danso
Concurrent with learning to code, I've often wished that my co-workers would
at least learn how to write parseable documents.

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.

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rohamg
This is an important philosophical question: should humans become better at
communicating in machine-parseable ways, or should machines become better at
parsing human communication?

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dbaupp
Preferably the latter, but human communication is inherently ambiguous and
heavily sensitive to context, and so actually implementing this is really
hard* and thus the former is actually (slightly) feasible at the moment.

*In fact, probably impossible: how often does one have to actually ask the author what they actually meant? Not appropriate for offline computer processing.

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Ataub24
Awesome post!

