What's important is that people have the shared language of Clean Code (or some other repository of best practices, could be integrated into your company styleguide, for instance). I.E. If Uncle Bob said "Don't do X" then we can have a conversation in that context if, in this scenario, doing X is acceptable. Without that logical reasoning, people will debate the very existence of "not doing X" as a best practice.

Except having these discussions is really hard. It ends up being you against uncle bob and you are not gonna win that argument against a senior-er engineer.

Don't think so. If the senior engineer is worth his salt he should know that programming is always about finding a balance between several aspects of a given problem - some of them technical, some of them human. As long as the code does what it's supposed to do the rest is mostly up to personal taste - so yes, you can have an insightful discussion, but there's only to learn, nothing to "win" for all participants.

Yep, but in practice Seniority comes either from experience or time in the industry. So you'll undoubtedly meet seniors that won't try to find that balance.

> but rules are important, and this is what we're missing today.

Programming rules are important - they make you think before you break them. Just don't turn rules into dogma - otherwise your devs will be more concerned with following the rules than solving the actual business problems. And you don't want that.

You should certainly be flexible around it, visit them every now and then to update. Also, we should enforce them once they are set.

Really don't like the enforcing. Okay, mixed feelings there.

Rules should help you along, perhaps set a framework for your thinking. But they never should limit you in achieving your goal. When establishing a rule you should also specify what you want to achieve by it, how you'll measure its effects and under which conditions it should be removed.

Rigid rule enforcement has a strong danger of shifting the priorities of the developers to the detriment of your business.