[throwaway_25434]

There are entire classes of problems where a group of n persons working effectively together will produce a much better solution than 1 single person on an island (where n > 1).

In those situations, white boarding and deep dive are useful activities.

Business owners would absolutely love it if you could just run a complex (high value-add, high margin) business by only getting a bunch of commodity developers just pulling JIRA tickets from a heap, quietly humming away.

Reality is that, collaboration is important and is required in order to create non trivial products, and thus the margin to pay for the “people doing real work”.

[matwood]

I agree collaboration is very important. What's interesting to me though is that very early in my career (pre ubiquitous video conferencing), I worked for a large multi-site corp. Me and another developer were the only developers in the local office, yet somehow we were able to collaborate using phone calls and email to build some pretty cool software with other team members in various offices around the US.

I'm not saying that digital tools are always perfect replacements, but there is a large gradient between a single person on an island and sitting shoulder to shoulder at a fold out table (which I have also done).

[thrower123]

This claim is commonly made anecdotally by extroverts, but I've never seen real evidence that it is true.