I work in an office with a mix of highly professional, low-ego workers and highly dismissive, high-ego workers. No history of freelancing there that I know of. One group is multiples easier to work with... guess which.
If I were to try and draw a line, I'd be more general and say that it depends on culture during early career. You can learn one of two lessons: That aggression is required and accepted way to win an argument, or that aggression is an unacceptable way to reach the correct solution. Both lessons are true in certain contexts, and depending on which goal is valued more in your culture (winning argument or correct solution), you'll learn one or both of these two lessons. If you truly believe that you will find the most correct solution alone, without the help of your team, you're very likely to learn lesson #1 and behave that way. That type of person, though, is destined to make a huge mistake and learn the hard way how to collaborate.
You are dismissing the reality that some people are actually smarter than others. There are some people who really do have a real vision of a 'best' solution. However, it is true that collaboration is the requirement for a working relationship and thus a product out of that working relationship... But, the collaborative effort and resultant end product is always, by necessity, a non-ideal solution for at least a portion of the end-users. Keeping this in mind, it can be understood that "the best product doesn't win" -- rather, the most popular and most agreed upon solution or product is what wins.
In summary -- I agree that negativity and/or aggressiveness in pursuit of a solution leads to a unworkable /collaborative/ environment... But I disagree that the collaborative environment produces the best product or solution to a problem [programming or general]
Warning! I am not one of the smart ones. I tend to sit in a corner and doodle like the article writer. Perhaps, if the collaborative environment was less collaborative and more constructive, I would participate more... see Office Space for better answer.
>You are dismissing the reality that some people are actually smarter than others.
I never dismissed anything like that. If I did, please quote my dismissal. In fact, this sounds like an assumption you made before reading what I wrote. Change your assumption and try reading it again.
> There are some people who really do have a real vision of a 'best' solution.
This statement only works with quotes around "best" and phrased as "a best" instead of "the best." I do not question that it is possible for a single person to have a driving vision, but what happens when this person, instead of explaining their reasoning to their collaborators, uses aggression to dominate them and force them to accept his or her solutions? Do flaws get pointed out? Or are we under the assumption that "smarter" people do not make mistakes? If not, with everyone on a team looking up to a single person to make all the decisions, who will catch the mistakes?
The question here was never "collaborate vs. don't collaborate." We're talking about teams, where a degree of collaboration is necessary to move forward, and individuals who disrupt the collaborative process via aggression.
>But, the collaborative effort and resultant end product is always, by necessity, a non-ideal solution for at least a portion of the end-users.
How is this different than non-collaborative effort? What exactly are you saying here? That a single person can build a completely perfect product that meets the needs for all end users while a group cannot? What you have said above is true whether collaboration is involved or not -- everything has flaws.
>Keeping this in mind, it can be understood that "the best product doesn't win" -- rather, the most popular and most agreed upon solution or product is what wins.
In a working collaborative environment, these two can be the same thing. When one person makes all the decisions by fiat, the solution that wins is that person's favorite, not one that has been thoroughly vetted or necessarily correct. I would rather rely on a vetting process than on a single human's biases. This is what collaboration is for, diluting biases and natural cognitive flaws. No one is immune to all biases and flaws.
>Perhaps, if the collaborative environment was less collaborative and more constructive, I would participate more.
What do you see as the difference between "collaborative" and "constructive"?
