It is eminitently reasonable for companies to have "readability standards" for their code. You're writing this code for humans to read, after all, at least in theory. You need to communicate to future inheritors of your code.
But that doesn't mean readability standards are good. Tony's company, for example, has rules about returning boolean values from functions, and those rules mean you are expected to write code like this:
public bool Completed ()
{
if (completed == true)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
It's more "explicit" this way. Which I certainly would have explicit things to say if I were told I needed to write code this way. Also, what's with the non-indented return statements? Is that also part of their coding standards?