[yodsanklai]

I can imagine this type of person to abide to their normal obligations during business hours, and code full time the rest of their wake-up time.

In my company, 80% coding for a senior SWE is rare. But if they deliver, management will give them some slack on the other evaluation axis. I have colleagues who work almost by themselves on new high impact projects. This has many benefits. No need to argue about designs, code reviews (people just approve blindly their code). The downside is that you need to deliver.

[vasco]

This is very true everywhere I've looked.

What also happens is regular developers (like me) want the same treatment as if they could end-to-end deliver "if they only let me", but many times can't, and actually need the structure and processes of a team. I've seen this freedom not working at all.

[fch42]

Indeed so ... the "structure" (call it bureaucracy of you like) is all of:

- an equalizer (entire team treated the same)

- a confidence booster (approval of others gives feeling of having done well)

- a way of distributing information (everyone is aware of all other team work)

You can run a team as a form of "competitive sport", and race everyone against each other; who churns out most "wins", and helpfulness, non-code-work, cross-team work are "distractors" to that objective hence undesirable and definitely not rewarded.

If the personalities in your team are "right" then this can work and by striving to best each other, all achieve highly. Have a single non-competitive person in there though... and it'll grate. Forcing a collaborative element into the work (whether by approval/review procedures, or by things like mentoring/coaching, or even just to force briefings to the team on project completion) creates a balance between the "lone crusaders" and the "power of the masses". Make the loners aware of, and contribute to, the concept of "team success", and give the "masses" insight into contributing factors of high individual performance.

[dustingetz]

yes there must be strong accountability for this to work (e.g. a self financed open source project or bootstrapped startup), not only do mid devs overestimate their appetite, motivation to grind and delivery, but also face the Curse of Development wrt communicating to the money people their value. Why should the rockstar grind away 50x harder than their coasting peers for 30% more salary? What happens when the bean counters reorg you or a manager labels you not a team player? Equity is the right form of comp to motivate this level of delivery and at that point it’s not about 50x skills but about sales and overcoming the communication gaps to establish a nonzero price for your equity. Which is why so many amazing niche projects languish and starve and the founder-engineer eventually breaks and goes and ships react apps for whatever empty startup has startup-investor fit that year