This kind of thing can really have an effect on your career in the immediate future. There are a lot of expectations that people come up with regarding what you

This kind of thing can really have an effect on your career in the immediate future. There are a lot of expectations that people come up with regarding what you should know by X years into your career and people judge you pretty strongly on this. I personally don't get any feedback on my code and I don't really have time to police myself on it. I end up blending in with the conventions I see in whatever current document I'm working on (e.g. presence of type prefixes, casing style, underscore usage). I always thought this was bad practice in the general population but I guess I get paid for it. We aren't going to raise the industry-wide skill level if we let people figure it out on their own the hard way. That's valuable up until a point but eventually they should start wanting to know what the effective way of doing X is (if it exists). Individuals take a long time to arrive at an optimal point with that stuff, and may never even reach it. I'm fairly sure NASA doesn't let staff (astronauts especially) in training learn everything the hard way. Imagine if your workplace maintained something like this: http://llis.nasa.gov/ http://llis.nasa.gov/