[groby_b]

Nope. It isn't. I predate the author by a decade+ (first job in 1996), and he's bloviating.

Ask me about the time we had an informal meeting to decide on the premeeting strategy where we'd define the strategy for the actual meeting which would then result in a presentation to management so a decision could be made :)

It's always been a question of the culture you're in, and what they're trying to do. It still is. More collaborators => more meetings. Less ability to tolerate bugs => more formal development processes.

There's only a limited set of things where you can bang away in your dev cave for a few months and emerge with something people actually want. (It's absolutely more fun than the more formal/meeting-heavy approaches, but you're limited in scope and quality)

(With the caveat that open offices are and always have been an extremely stupid idea, and those were indeed less common)