Software Jobs with Less Collaboration?

Question

Do you know of potential software areas where the work isn't as collaborative as it is in your typical Scrum/Agile team? If given a choice, I would very much prefer to be left alone to work on a solution, and not have to constantly interface with the rest of the team over trivialities. In the case of my current job, I have a strong suspicion that communication overhead is so large that the work of our 10+ people team could be done by one or two folks, if we were just allowed to work in an efficient manner (i.e. not sharing every bit of knowledge with everybody else, not setting up and maintaining baroque testing and CI/CD pipeline etc.)I'm thinking that writing support software for scientific research at universities could be like that (partly because they can't just afford to hire teams to do the job, so a single guy often must suffice). Do you have any other ideas?

trengorilla · Accepted Answer

I'm in a team of one.I develop ERP/MRP integrations for a manufacturing company. So we have an ERP system which we purchased and I build things on top of it to enhance processes within the company. Production trackers, product configurators, issue monitoring, things to speed up engineering management etc. I'm sure there are other roles like this in manufacturing firms because very few of these ERP systems actually do exactly what you want out of the box.It's good because I'm not just a code monkey. I (and others) identify issues/improvements, I design the solution, I implement the solution and then I train people on how to use it. There's a lot of autonomy.