[andi999]

Actually the brilliant loner should be the norm (to have one), not the exception. If you believe in the 20:80 rule, that 20% of the people to 80% of the work. This rule doesnt sound so bad but actually (lets take these numbers as strict and not as a probability distribution). It means your top perfomer are 16 times more productive than the lower performers. Lets say you have a team of 10 people doing 100 work units. So 2 do 80 work units which is 40 per person, and 8 do 20 units which is 2,5 units per person.

Of course you could say this principle does not apply to your team (good luck!)

[jevgeni]

I'd agree with that, but it doesn't require that productive people are "loners". Best programmers I know are brilliant in communicating with people, setting standards, and so forth. Even if they sometime crank out a library or two on their own over morning coffee.

What is way more toxic, are people who consider themselves brilliant loners, because they've just implemented a web server using only Python's list comprehensions. And that is surely evidence of their unbridled genius. You know, people who are decent enough programmers, but are so egocentric in their work, that it borders on being inconsiderate.

For example, I used to work in a team where we wrote a lot of Python. We were three and one guy out of us considered himself above PEP-8 (he was good on the SW subject matter and was tight with the manager, so that went on unchecked). For example, all indents were done with 2 spaces. Meaning when some of us had to fix or change his code we had to fight our editors/IDEs. We ended up autopeping his files by default and ignoring any complaints.

[onion2k]

In my experience having a brilliant loner on the team increases the amount of work the team needs to do by more than they contribute. Also, very often, what they contribute is clever solutions to problems that didn't need clever solutions. The few teams when I've had that sort of person on my team productivity has gone down, not up.

Regarding the point you make about 20% of the people doing 80% of the work, that's half true. I find that 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but for any given period of time it's not always the same 20% of the people. One iteration might have a couple of back-end devs doing most of the stories, and the next iteration will find those two doing less while 80% of the stories are done by a DBA and a UX researcher. I've never had a team where one person consistently does most of the work. If that was the case I would be concerned about the make up of the team - clearly I'd need more people who do the sort of work that person is doing and less of the other team members.

Obviously my experience is not universal, so your experience may be very different.

[brtkdotse]

This is my experience as well. Give me a few medicore, but friendly and well-adjusted developers and we'll deliver a decent CRUD app within a standard deviation of budget and time.

Give me a team of superstars and we'll deliver a half-finished framework for solving the general class of CRUD problems one could have, along with a bad implementation of a gherkin dialect.