A common coding style promotes consistency and makes it easy for different people to easily understand, maintain and expand the whole code base, not only their own pieces. It also makes it easier for new people to learn the code faster. Thus, any team should have a guidelines on how the code is expected to be written.
Important guidelines include (in no particular order):
- whitespace and indentation
- standard comments - file, class or method headers
- naming convention - classes, interfaces, variables, namespaces, files
- code annotations
- project organization - folder structures, binaries
- standard libraries - what templates, generics, containers and so on to use
- error handling - exceptions, hresults, error codes
- threading and synchronization
Also, be wary of programmers that can't or won't adapt to the style of the team, no matter how bright they might be. If they don't play by one of the team rules, they probably won't play by other team rules as well.
