I partially agree with you that authorship is still visible, even when writing to a very strict coding standard. I'm thinking of a colleague who wrote a little

I partially agree with you that authorship is still visible, even when writing to a very strict coding standard. I'm thinking of a colleague who wrote a little mini-templating system to solve a particular issue. That style of solution was very characteristic of him. But the point is, I could read through it almost at the same speed I could read my own code from a few months ago. And, when I was modifying someone else's code, I didn't have to make any hard decisions. For example, if my predecessor had named functions inconsistently, I could make some lame attempt to follow what had been done, or try to carve out a chunk of code done "my" way. But at Google I never had that problem. And that's why people at Google can modify each other's codebases all the time.