Strong words. I wonder if the author has PTSD from poorly managed teams and has never had the fortune to work in a high performance well managed collaborative environment. I agree these are rare compared to the other kind, but they exist. Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves. One person didn't build the pyramids, the Linux kernel, or Amazon Web services. Even when responsibility for a top level domain rests with a single person, you still have to coordinate the work of people building the individual components.

One of the features of my work, these days, is that I work alone. I worked in [pretty high-functioning] teams, for most of my career.

Teams are how you do big stuff. I’m really good at what I do, but I’ve been forced to reduce my scope, working alone. I do much smaller projects, than our team used to do.

But the killer in teams, is communication overhead, and much of that, is imposed by management, trying to get visibility. If the team is good, they often communicate fine, internally.

Most of the examples he gave, are tools of management, seeking visibility.

But it’s also vital for management to have visibility. A team can’t just be a “black box,” but a really good team can have a lot of autonomy and agency.

You need good teams, and good managers. If you don’t have both, it’s likely to be less-than-optimal.

It's a provocative title, but I think this section better captures his scope of argument - "Collaboration-as-ideology has made ownership and responsibility feel antisocial, which is a hell of a thing, given that ownership is the only mechanism that gets anything across the finish line.", as well as "But there’s a huge difference between communication and collaboration as infrastructure to support individual, high-agency ownership, and communication and collaboration as the primary activity of an organisation".

I think the author has identified that most organizations both fail at effective collaboration, and also use collaboration to paper over their failures.

I think the author maybe over-corrects by leaning on the idea that "only small teams actually get stuff done", and honestly I don't think anyone should be using SLA Marshall/Men Against Fire as an analogy for like... office work (if nothing else, even if you take his words at face value, then the percentage of US infantry who fired their rifles went up from 15-25% in WW2 to ~50% in Korea due to training improvements), but I can get behind the idea that a lot of organizations are setup to diffuse responsibility.

I also do think it's interesting to think about building the Pyramids. For the vast majority of people involved... I don't think modern audiences would call their work relationship or style "collaborative". Usually we use "collaborative" in opposition (at different times) to "working alone", "working with strict boundaries", and "being highly directed in what to do". Being on a work gang, or even being a team foreman is very much "no working alone", but those were also likely highly directed jobs (you must bring this specific stone to this specific location by this time) with strict boundaries.

Agreed. I came in the comments to say something similar. I think the author raises some interesting points worth consideration but their perspective is so incredibly cynical. He mentioned a small team that made the Apollo computer program. Well it took an awful lot more than a computer program to get to the moon. I don’t think anybody would argue that there are people who don’t pull their weight out there but there is so much evidence that people working together actually works that it makes you wonder who hurt the author so much.

> Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves.

It's not a linear scale. A lone wolf can't produce the latest Assassin's Creed game. A committee can't produce Stardew Valley or Balatro. They're different capabilities, not a simple matter of more/less.

I can't say anything about how the Pyramids or AWS was build. But the Linux Kernels maintainence is full of responsibilities assigned to individual people.

At first, I also thought that rejecting collaboration excludes any kind of teamwork, but then I noticed the quotation marks - so they're apparently only rejecting quote-unquote-collaboration (as in "collaboration theatre": endless calls with no tangible outcome, wanting to involve everyone in decisions etc.), not actual collaboration (which is also consistent with what the article itself says).

Depends on the problem being solved. And how frequently the core prob changes. Cuz nothing is static in an ever changing universe.

What organization, skills, leadership is required to explore a jungle for gold is very different from what organization, skills and leadership is required to run a gold mine.

So we get explore-exploit tradeoffs, satisficing vs optimizing choices etc.

Yeah, the sheer joy I've gotten from being part of a few collaborative teams in my career was amazing. It was like we all got smarter by working together.