Fast forward to today: nearly every software development job advert talks about teams, or specific team-oriented practises ("SCRUM", "Agile", etc.). Searching for "solo developer" or similar brings up a long list of articles about why working on your own is problematic, a few talking about historical solo projects (while pointing out that "we don't do stuff like this any more") and basically nothing in defence of the solo programmer. About the closest I can find to such a defence comes -- a little surprisingly -- from the XP people [1]. This is counter-intuitive to me: tooling has generally improved since the 80s (with a few reservations) and the range of libraries available has increased massively. So a solo programmer has extra leverage and ought to be able to achieve more today, not less.

I suspect there's a degree of ascertainment bias here due to plenty of successful solo programmers churning out useful code but not feeling too much urge to write about it. But really, it does seem like there has been a change over the past decade or so, and very few people are willing to speak out for the solo coder.

Can anyone think of any exception?

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160709203742/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TeamOfOne