It’s easy to work in isolation as nobody bothers you. It still works when you work in cubicle like structures where you speak when you really need to. People need to come to your cubicle to reach you. I may want to communicate through emails even though I know you are sitting just next to me.
Having said that, through experience, we all know that it all boils down to inefficiency, huge time taken to finish a simple thing, long email trails which sometimes never reach to a conclusion, a middle management whose sole purpose is to manage the communication through layers.
Not only software world but also corporate world is moving towards collaboration, no-cubicle culture, team-work and no heroism culture. All that is fine and in general it makes sense also, but as professionals are we prepared or trained on how to deal with humans or different human behaviours? While working with many Agile projects, I could see that problem hindering project success is not essentially technical but soft skills. Agile promotes pair-programming but doesn’t teach on how to deal with certain individuals or the way they work.
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