Assuming your team members are actually:
- capable and not just good salesmen that got into their positions due to various factors like resume-driven development, obscene levels of networking or nepotism, being in the right place at the right time — and riding that wave — etc.
- have gotten the junior-level giggles out of them — and understand that the simplest solution is the best solution; rather than something needlessly complex because:
(“it won’t scale” (i.e I’m at best bored and want to try something new, and at worst trying to shoehorn something insane to further my resume) ||
“we have to do it this way” (i.e. I read a blog post last night and want it to seem like I’m knowledgeable and not an imposter with zero critical thinking ability) ||
“this is the correct way to do it” (i.e. I’m stalling again because I cannot think of a way to provide business value other than prostelyzing various opinions and philosophies about software engineering, despite there being zero hard and objective data that what I’m saying is in anyway effective for anything more than making me seem like I know what I’m talking about))
At that point, once you have enough maturity and experience (i.e the knack for being able to adapt to circumstances by your lonesome), you do not need to collaborate. You can almost always figure it out by searching online for what is almost always a trivial, already-been-solved issue, or by going for a few walks and mulling it over in your head. If it’s a truly hard problem, you can even sit down somewhere and work it through inside your head.
The only two types of collaboration I’ve ever seen in the workplace is:
1). Someone less learned on a subject picking the brain of someone more learned (fair if the subject is complex, and not easily accessible through literature; but grating if it’s something puerile like how to use a tool — RTFM)
2). Two people brainstorming something and coming to the wrong conclusion because they’re implicitly more interested in socializing correctly than coming up with the right answer. You see this with whiteboards a lot.
For example, M$’s Roslyn a few noobs were trying to figure out what data structure to use for representing syntax nodes and the solution they come up all these years ago was utterly silly (red and green trees) — solely because they were white boarding the problem out, and trying to come to a consensus (and to keep the vibes good, maaan) rather than to find the best answer.
Both are subpar from an efficiency standpoint, but great from a career standpoint.
N.B. If it’s not already apparent, I’ve grown tired of “collaboration.” I’ve grown tired of seeing it create more problems. And I’ve grown tired of the intellectual dishonesty around it.