[dkersten]

Some companies might have a place for that special someone, who you can lock in a room for a month and he will later emerge with an amazing new piece of code that will solve your problems, shielded from all the problems of the outside world, but companies where that is possible are very rare.

Also, being able to develop like that is very rare because in the real world, requirements change or are vague and need to be clarified, or your software has to interoperate or integrate with other software. There is simply no way to avoid regular communication and still produce something that works how it needs to. Problems where you can shut yourself away for a long period of time certainly exist, but in the grand scheme of software jobs, they're few and far between.