Andrey Agibalov We’re told that teamwork is everything. Collaboration, communication, sync meetings, shared ownership — all those sacred words that supposedly make projects work better. But often, teamwork just means more friction.
If you decompose a big problem the right way, each piece becomes something one person can handle fully. One person, one scope, full context. That’s when things move fast and stay clean. The moment you bring in two or three people for one task, you introduce sync needs, coordination, context sharing, and misunderstandings. Suddenly, you’re spending more time aligning than building.
Take something simple, like hammering a nail. It’s a one-person job. But imagine turning it into a team project: one person makes the swing, another holds the nail, and a third one actually hits it. Now you also need someone to manage the timing and communication between them. What was once a simple, natural motion has become a coordination nightmare.
And there’s another thing: good problems let you see the whole picture. You can step back, look at the result, and feel proud — like when the picture hangs perfectly on the wall because you hammered the nail yourself. You can’t feel the same pride if your only role was to hold the nail while someone else took the swing. When work gets sliced too thin, it stops being meaningful.
In software, it’s the same story. A “frontend team” has to talk to the “backend team,” who talk to the “database team,” and everyone has to agree on formats, endpoints, and deadlines. Meanwhile, a full-stack developer could have built the whole thing already — knowing exactly how data is stored, fetched, and displayed, with no meetings, no waiting, no handoffs.
Teamwork has its place, of course. Some things are truly too big or too complex for one person. But most of the time, we’re not fighting complexity — we’re just fighting the system we created ourselves. Sometimes, the best team is a team of one.