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Personal feelings: no; get your graffiti out of the database, if I want to know that PwC created a field 5 years ago (I don't), I can look in the logs.

Exactly. I have used "grafitti" to describe that kind of behaviour too. The meta-data doesn't belong in the field ID.

before my time someone had installed a bundle where all the custom object names are in the format [companyname_object_descp.] - is that the sort of thing you're referring to?

Partially yes

oh, you mean the company name took up so many characters that the field id is no longer descriptive

Yes.

yeah agreed it's rather useless. but as long as the rest of the field id is descriptive/useful it's alright with me.

I think if the customer / partner are sensible and use brief names there's no issue. For example on an account I'm working on, the customer insists that their users prefix with "ll_" and we prefix "sta_" It makes ownership apparent at a glance and doesn't really affect the meaningfulness of the name.

If you're staria, that's fine as you're namespacing your packages. If you’re a random professional services firm; you don't have ownership of anything, you'll be off the account one day and nobody needs your name in the database schema. If the partners are doing it, why not the consultants? custbody_craig_vat_rate :-) I'd separate distinct packages / bundles for sure though. This topic actually came up when I was working with a PE firm that uses some Staria bundles; the BI team were very upset with poorly named database tables/columns, etc., in NetSuite and were strongly pushing to stop people from putting their company names in their database for no apparent gain. The BI team were more database purists, though, whereas plenty of NetSuite consultants aren't familiar with the underlying system architecture.

Not sure what you mean by "packages" unless you mean suiteapps / bundles but mostly I work on bespoke customisations so everything I create is sta_ prefixed. I cannot speak to other people in the company and how they have historically named things, like most big organisations there is always going to be a different level of quality and experience across the resource pool. I've worked at 5 partners and an end user and never once come across a customer that was unhappy with the naming convention, YMMV I guess 🤷🏻‍♂️ Not wishing to get in to a debate about it btw, you were asking for thoughts and this is just mine 😄

End customers will rarely complain about this; most have no understanding or awareness of the sheer amount of technical debt they take on in the system of which poor naming conventions are only a tiny part. I've only seen this specific complaint twice in many years, and that's only been from very large users that are doing deep work in the database/BI space.