Teamwork or Solo Development: Which Do You Prefer?

It depends on the project, but i'll try to set it like this, too many hands on the keyboard is the crowd, but projects are rarely solo effort. Too many things and one person rarely can cover all the areas.

Teamwork.... I like to see different ideas, and maybe put them all together in a project. I also love advice, like if someone can tell me what to improve, and even tell me the mistakes i've made.. i always look for second, third and fourth opinions!!! 😂😂😂

It depends how extreme you go. My favourite project was when I was building something in a team of three. I primarily worked on the backend API (though I was learning modern frontend technologies at the time to do full-stack). The other two team members were primarily frontend.

We worked as a team in that we helped each other out with learning/coding problems. We had stand-ups each morning to co-ordinate work and sprint plannings/retrospectives. And we did demos to Product Management as a team too.

While we would work on our own individual tasks solo (unless we wanted help), we all worked towards building a product. (I'd also ask other backend developers outside of that team to PR my code).

It depends on case to case basis. When working on a critical piece of work I prefer doing pairing, this makes the context sharing with multiple people within team thus the knowledge is shared. However, where things are repetitive and could be easily managed on my own I will work solo

I'm more likely to work on my own, but finding a community generally makes me more creative and more motivated and productive. E.g. I've been doing a lot since I found FreeSewing, whether it be contributing to the project or coming up with my own ideas adjacent to it.

Peer reviews and having a colleague to bounce ideas off makes for a diverse team, no doubt. However team collaboration should not be confused with training activities such as pair programming. Those facilitate knowledge transfer well, but offer little in terms of self discovery and growth.

I’ve always found myself being more productive when I have a team around me. Being able to work on tasks and projects on an individual basis within a team is ideal for me.

You get to learn more from other people as well, in my opinion

As has been said "It Depends". My normal workflow is to work with the team and the customer to nail down requirements and strategy for meeting the requirements. From there I like to go hide and hone my understanding of the requirements and strategies then start coding. Then I come out of my hiding place to ask questions, get code reviews, update strategy, etc.

Teamwork that leads to safe future solo work

i.e need team work to isolate work that proves abilities of teams to deliver faster with good architecture and design in place..

👋 for now I prefer working in a team for the shared experience and diverse perspective
As a newbie it makes working easier

I prefer both!

I love pairing sessions with my colleagues, discussing design decisions and implementation details, sometimes it is not easy to come to an agreement and I've learned to let it go when both solutions are not that different, to move forward with the problem at hand.

A the same time I enjoy focusing on a specific task alone, especially when trying something new, requiring many iterations to come to the final decision. It happened recently that I did not like too much the direction taken for a certain project but at the same time I did not have a clear idea on how to proceed. After a day of experiments I came out with a solution I liked a lot, and my colleagues too (fortunately!).

So are you a lone wolf or a team player?

Yes.

Prefer going the indie developer route now.

Teamwork everytime!

Teamwork always. It is the best way to learn from others and to share experiences.