Let me start out by saying that coding standards are good. As long as the serve two purposes: increasing the quality of the code, and making it easier for people to read/understand other peoples code.

Dumbing down to the lowest common denominator, however, isn't very useful in my opinion. Personally, I would refuse to work under the rules laid down. Not using strict or -w could be circumvented for a while; just develop your code with use strict; and use warnings 'all';, and just before checking in, change the use to no, but that breaks down as soon as someone else touches your code, or you have to work on someone elses code. Most of the other rules are downright absurd.

I would step to the manager and declare that apparently she has hired a big bunch of people not up to the task (programming Perl), and that I will not dumb down to their level. For me to be useful, I will have to work with peers - not morons. Depending on her reaction, I would seek work elsewhere. Be it in the same department, same company, or at some other company. I would make it clear to her she carries responsibility for hiring incompetent people, and that I don't have any qualms in venting that opinion to her boss. In fact, I'd probably state this in email, Cc-ed as far up the chain as appropriate.

The success of this of course depends on your reputation/experience, your salary (the more you get paid, the less eager they are to have you perform suboptimally) and the power of the manager.

Of course, there's always the difference between theory and practise. What will they do if you write quality code, breaking the coding standards? Fire you? On what grounds? And then don't forget that rm is an excellent debugging tool - specially if you have to debug someone elses code.

-- Abigail