One thing that separates humans from animals is our ability to build and improve upon the work of previous humans. We can only accomplish this by recording our work and communicating it in a way that someone else can learn, understand, and build upon what we have accomplished.
The history of many modern sciences started in ancient civilizations. People today are only able to make new discoveries, because they were able to get caught up on all the physics, chemistry, math, biology, and other science that was done beforehand. Essentially, this shrinks the amount of time to get to the edge of that new discovery from thousands of years of human effort, to less than a lifetime.
With regards to software engineering, the ability to organize and communicate our code to other humans is just as important, if not more important, than what the code itself is doing. After all, maintenance is the most expensive part of creating software, and this is nearly impossible if a different engineer cannot easily follow or understand the code they are looking at.
So, what separates us from the animals? Coding Standards.
Coding standards to code are the equivalent of recorded history to all scientific discoveries. I’m not trying to claim that if some code did not follow standards, then others wouldn’t still be able to trace the code and eventually figure out how it works. However, the standards certainly act as a lubricant in this regard, and make the entire learning, communication, and building process happen a lot faster, which brings whomever is unfamiliar with a problem in the code up to speed a lot faster than without any standards.
Thus, these standards shrink the time it takes a team member to find an issue in someone else’s code and fix it, much like a textbook shrinks the amount of time it takes a student to learn calculus, rather than spend their life discovering it.