by this culture, do you mean a dysfunctional one? The braces / indentation formatting argument is one that has come up in a place I used to work (on many occasions) and generally it seems to be this is indicative of people focusing on the wrong things, I still don't understand why, when there are so many larger issues to address, that this comes up time and time again, in the case of the company I worked for, this was just the tip of the iceberg as seemingly every topic would devolve into a meandering, pointless "discussion" (argument) where if they would just stick with known conventions a lot of wasted time would be saved.