How often do your projects involve real team work vs working in silos?

I value collaboration as in: high level discussions about how to solve a problem or what’s next in the quarter. When it comes to implementation, please let me do it alone. There’s nothing worse than sitting next to someone to write code (because we all write code differently: I for instance don’t like to stare at the screen for more than 20min. I love to think about the code in my head while taking a walk… now all of that goes to hell if I have to do pair programming)

It really depends on the person. And people change too!

I’ve seen scenarios where someone will refuse to collaborate tightly (eg: pair programming), but also be surprisingly slow at getting around the tools and getting code out the door. Or they rabbit hole on something that ends up being a waste of time.

I’ve also seen scenarios where someone who is highly proficient just needs context to do a fantastic job - for example, a designer pairing with a front end engineer to iterate on some UI changes in an hour.

I’ve also seen scenarios where people expect a huge amount of direction and task definition upfront, and refuse to work in ambiguous circumstances. And the opposite.

And finally I’ve seen scenarios where you think you’re about to sit down with someone to work together on something, and you realise your time is better spent understanding the issues they’re facing in their life, and their concerns, and dignifying them before considering the task at hand.

If you suspect that siloing is preventing you or your team from accomplishing more, faster, more sustainably, make a case for it. But don’t cargo cult pair programming or backlog grooming or any other process for the sake of it, then you’ll just look silly. Good luck!

Depends on the company and team. It’s a culture problem.

My team of contractors working for a large government department work together all the damn time. Most of us are fully remote so it’s pretty common to have work calls that can take more than an hour just for peer programming. Sometimes there are calls that start with a valid business purpose but are really just social calls because working from home can get lonely and you want to get to know people better.