Hiding Considered Harmful If you spend all of your time working alone, you’re increasing the risk of unnecessary failure and cheating your potential for growth. Even though software development is deeply intellectual work that can require deep concentration and alone time, you must play that off against the value (and need!) for collaboration and review.
I get that this is generally true. But it seems overly absolute. Many of the most significant innovations do happen this way. I know we should generally/often discourage it (and why), but I think the admonishing tone is unnecessary and perhaps even a disservice to the message.
Again, I don't just argue this out of principle. Sometimes people are better off going off to work alone at first. I've seen others do this successfully, and experienced it myself.
Part of the reason is to avoid unnecessary doubt, invalid concerns (but understandable for the context), or even counter-proposals for other ideas . At least one personal example comes to mind. I shared an idea for a declarative query language and protocol to be used on top of RESTful APIs to eliminate round-trips. It was received with unfounded doubt (it was obvious that they didn't fully _get_ it[1]), which was fine, reasonable, and even understandable. Nonetheless, it was a slowdown. Fleshing out the idea or even a prototype would have circumvented a lot of unnecessary doubt.
Other responses were obstacles, like "get approval from <x,>." I let that slow me down for more than a year. Finally, I went off to just do it on my own, on the side. With less than a week's worth of work (spread out over a month of nights and weekends), I had a fully-working prototype fitted into existing systems that cut latency in half. Meanwhile (during the year I let myself be slowed down), Facebook had announced a fundamentally identical technology, GraphQL (but incompatible with REST / our current technology).
[1] For example, people concerned that it would overload the micoservices even though it wouldn't actually change how much data clients would requst (except indirectly because _people might use the app more because it was faster_).
