The real answer is "code review by peers." Should you have a 100-page book of Coding Law that programmers must follow, on pain of firing? No. That's a demorali

The real answer is "code review by peers." Should you have a 100-page book of Coding Law that programmers must follow, on pain of firing? No. That's a demoralizing distraction. Should you say this? >> You decide if you can sleep at night with random code layouts and inconsistent variable names. No. That's inviting each developer to leave a mess for the one who comes after them. How about something moderate and - gasp! - subjective, like, "if your peers find your code confusing, you're doing it wrong?" >> They are a little message that you are not good enough. You cannot quite be trusted. I understand the sentiment here, but we're all capable of writing code that's clear to us right now, but isn't to others and/or won't be clear to us in the future. That's one reason why we have code review, and none of us should be ashamed to admit that we benefit from it.