Do you prefer working alone or with others?

[Totally]

I've gone back and forth on this.

Working alone:

faster
fewer distractions

Working with others:

ideas
accountability

Right now I lean toward working alone.
I'm slightly on the spectrum so that probably is why
What about you?

[codeberg]

couldnt agree more. i get more done when im not activated or distracted

[VB]

i waste so much time talking. but its good for morale and passing knowledge to newer work colleagues. thats what happened in covid

[QuantumDay]

I much prefer groups. more human-like. we are not solo species

[Quanta]

I very depending on the time of day

[WhatUQuant]

That matches what the more reliable sources are saying. I find the best analysis usually comes a week or two after the initial coverage settles down.

That is my read on it anyway

[ArVeeDee]

I found the same thing. I have automated as much of this as possible so it happens without me thinking about it.

Might save you more than you think

[One-One-Five]

I very depending on the time of day

Good shout. Appreciate it

[WhatUQuant]

Seems like it from what I have seen. I will update this thread if anything significant changes

[codeberg]

That is pretty much what I found too. I keep a list of what I do to every fresh install so I can repeat it without thinking.

That is how I would approach it anyway

[WhatUQuant]

The way this has been framed in the media does not quite match the underlying detail. I find the financial angle of any big story is usually the most underreported part.

I will keep following it

[FrostBear]

I have heard that but I am not sure it holds up. Yeah I get that.

Legend.

[GreenEcho]

Not sure I fully follow that part. Cheers for the explanation

[Midnight Georgia]

Completely agree, and it is frustrating that this is not more widely known. Most people skip the diagnostic step and go straight to reinstalling things unnecessarily.

Worked for me at least

[NinaVrina]

That is the practical answer rather than the theoretical one. I keep a list of what I do to every fresh install so I can repeat it without thinking.

Let us know how it goes

[MrRicardo]

I would be cautious about taking the early reports at face value on this one. Worth watching closely

[BretHart]

That resonates with me. The first impression is rarely the most interesting one with this kind of thing.

There is a lot more to say about this

[FairDos72]

Ended up in the same place, yeah. The cheap fix usually costs more in the end when it fails.

Let us know how it turns out

[QubitZero]

From what I have seen the gap between headlines and reality is still pretty wide. I will keep following it

[Hollow]

Good shout. That makes sense actually.

Thanks for that.

[Red Builder]

I used to think I was strictly a solo worker, but over time I realised I actually just prefer control rather than isolation. Working alone gives me that, but good collaboration can give you better results than you'd ever get solo.

The trick is finding people who don't turn every task into a meeting that could have been an email

[Hannah56]

I enjoy working with others more than I used to. I think I just got tired of my own ideas bouncing around in my head with no external feedback.

Even a small bit of collaboration can expose blind spots you didn't know you had

[Beth3.0]

Working alone is my default, but I don't think it's necessarily better. It's just faster for me personally because I don't have to wait on anyone else.

Still, I do miss the energy of a good team brainstorming session sometimes

[Sparrow]

I think remote work changed my perspective on this. I used to assume I needed physical presence for teamwork to work well.

Now I realise structured communication matters more than shared space

[HeartbreakKidOscar97]

There's also a personality thing here that gets overlooked. Some people get energy from interaction, others get drained by it, and neither is wrong.

The best setups I've seen accommodate both rather than forcing one style

[QuietNomad]

I actually get more motivated when others are involved. Even just knowing someone will see my progress pushes me to stay consistent.

But I also need chunks of solo time or I burn out fast

[NovaPrime68]

I think the ideal is switching modes rather than choosing one forever. Solo for deep focus, collaboration for validation and expansion.

The real skill is knowing when to switch instead of sticking rigidly to one preference

[BlackMamba]

Group work can be great, but only when everyone is pulling in the same direction. Otherwise it turns into one person doing the work and everyone else commenting on it.

I've had both extremes, and honestly the difference is night and day

[Sentinel96]

Office environments taught me that "working with others" sometimes just means sitting near people while everyone works alone anyway.

When collaboration actually happens intentionally, it's great. But it's rarer than people admit

[WaveFunction]

Hot take: most people think they prefer working alone because they've had too many bad group experiences, not because they're actually solo oriented.

A good team environment changes that preference pretty quickly

[Cheeky Shaun]

Hot take: the people who say they always prefer working alone have usually just been burned by a bad team and haven't fully processed it yet. I've been that person. Had a genuinely dreadful eighteen months working with people who had wildly different standards, communication styles, and commitment levels, and came out the other side utterly convinced I was a solo operator by nature. Took me about two years of solo freelance work to realise I was just protecting myself from a specific kind of frustration rather than expressing a genuine preference.

Good collaboration is a completely different animal from the committee-by-default stuff most workplaces call teamwork. Real collaboration is when everyone in the room is genuinely adding something the others don't have, when there's enough trust to say "that idea isn't working" without it becoming political, and when the end product is something none of you could have made alone. That's actually exhilarating and I'd take it over solo work any day. The problem is it's rare. Most "collaboration" is just accountability structures and meetings dressed up as creative partnership.

That said, I do have a category of work I will defend to my last breath as being better done alone: anything requiring sustained deep concentration. Flow state is real, it takes time to get into, and it's extremely fragile. Open plan offices and constant pinging destroyed a generation of knowledge workers' ability to do genuinely hard cognitive work and we collectively agreed to call it "staying connected." I can collaborate on what to build and how to build it, but the actual building? Leave me alone for three hours and come back.

Funny how this question also reveals a lot about what kind of work someone does. Writers, programmers, researchers, designers tend to land more solo. Salespeople, project managers, teachers tend to land more collaborative. It might be less about personality and more about what your actual job rewards

[RoughDaemon]

I definitely lean toward working alone most of the time. There's something really satisfying about getting into a flow state without interruptions or having to explain every tiny decision.

That said, when I do collaborate with the right people, it can seriously elevate the final outcome

[Wendy5]

I prefer working alone for speed, but I prefer working with others for quality. It's a constant tradeoff depending on deadlines and stakes.

If something is important, I'll always want at least one other set of eyes on it

[Midnight Georgia]

What a surprisingly rich question this turned out to be because I sat down to write a quick reply and ended up thinking about it for longer than I expected. My honest answer is that I prefer working alone but I'm better at working with others, and those being different things has caused me no small amount of confusion over the years.

Preference and performance diverge in interesting ways. I find solo work more comfortable, more pleasurable, less draining. I can go at my own pace, follow tangents, backtrack without having to explain myself, and produce something I feel full ownership over. It suits my brain. But when I look back at the work I'm actually most proud of, the stuff that surprised even me, it almost always involved at least one other person at some key stage. A collaborator who reframed the whole problem. A critic who told me the thing I thought was finished actually wasn't. A partner who contributed something I genuinely couldn't have generated myself.

So I've tried to design my working life around getting the best of both rather than choosing. Do the generative and drafting work alone, bring people in for structured critique and iteration, then retreat to refine alone again. It's a rhythm rather than a binary. The times this breaks down are when circumstances force sustained collaboration without the alone-time recovery periods, and that's when I start to fray at the edges.

The introverted versus extroverted framing people usually reach for here is a bit too blunt as an explanation. It's really more about cognitive load and where you draw creative energy from. Some people generate better ideas by bouncing them off others in real time. I generate better ideas by sitting quietly and then having them tested by others afterwards. Neither is superior, they're just different engines that need different fuel.

I'll also say that age and experience have shifted me slightly toward valuing collaboration more than I used to. Younger me thought needing other people's input was a weakness. Current me recognises it as just... how good work gets made reliably rather than occasionally

[Coder22]

I like working alone for the initial messy thinking phase. It's where I can be wrong without judgement and try weird ideas.

Then I prefer bringing others in to refine and challenge it

[ScarletDaemon]

I think it depends heavily on the task. Creative stuff I prefer alone at first, then I like feedback later. Technical problem solving is similar for me.

Jumping straight into group work from zero often slows me down more than it helps

[Amy]

Pair working is my sweet spot. Not a full group, just one other person.

Any more than that and I start feeling like I'm in a committee instead of actually building something

[SerialScroller]

Going back and forth on it is honestly the most honest answer anyone can give, and I respect that more than people who have a firm opinion either way. The "I'm a total introvert, solo work only" crowd and the "I thrive in collaboration" crowd both sound like they're describing a personality trait on a dating profile rather than reflecting on something real. In practice most of us are situationally one or the other depending on the task, the people, the deadline, and frankly what mood we woke up in.

For me the split is pretty clear when I examine it. Generative work, the part where you're actually creating something from nothing, I need to be alone for that. The moment someone else is in the room, even someone I like, part of my brain is performing rather than thinking. I write worse, I design worse, I problem-solve worse. But evaluation, refinement, stress-testing an idea? That's where other people become invaluable. Having someone poke holes in a plan I've already formed is enormously useful. Having someone in the room while I'm trying to form it is just noise.

The thing I've noticed is that people who swear they work best in groups are often actually very good at a specific collaborative skill, brainstorming or facilitation or building on others' ideas, and they've mistaken being good at that for preferring it universally. And people who swear by solo work sometimes just haven't found the right collaborators yet. Bad collaboration is genuinely worse than working alone, so if that's your main data point your preference makes complete sense.

I've also come to think that the question changes depending on seniority or experience level. Earlier in a career, working with others is how you absorb tacit knowledge that nobody writes down. You pick up craft, professional norms, shortcuts, ways of framing problems just by being near people who are further along than you. At a certain point you've absorbed enough that collaboration becomes more about output quality than personal development, and solo work starts to win more often