I understand this will not explain entirety of it, but when you concentrate responsibility, decision making and ability to do all things through entirety of the application, you can move much, much faster than what all of us are used to working for regular companies.
It almost feels, and sometimes is cheating.
I was confronted with this when I felt really fantastic being super productive at one of the projects and then a team member pointed out that I am also tech lead, architect and a manager all in one and I simply don't work by the same rules as everybody else. Where everybody else has to get permissions, approvals, concensus, inputs, has to wait for other people to do things, I can just do it all in my head and act immediately. This taught me an important lesson and I am now much more conscious of this fact and spending way more time trying to remove any barriers from other team members.
This also explains why solo developers can sometimes achieve so much -- they simply don't have to work with anybody else. They don't have to understand code somebody else designed and wrote. They don't have to spend time arguing defending their approach or solutions. They know how everything works and can make all decisions solely on whether it helps them to achieve the result. Synchronising with other people is a huge overhead in any organisation.
It almost feels, and sometimes is cheating.
I was confronted with this when I felt really fantastic being super productive at one of the projects and then a team member pointed out that I am also tech lead, architect and a manager all in one and I simply don't work by the same rules as everybody else. Where everybody else has to get permissions, approvals, concensus, inputs, has to wait for other people to do things, I can just do it all in my head and act immediately. This taught me an important lesson and I am now much more conscious of this fact and spending way more time trying to remove any barriers from other team members.
This also explains why solo developers can sometimes achieve so much -- they simply don't have to work with anybody else. They don't have to understand code somebody else designed and wrote. They don't have to spend time arguing defending their approach or solutions. They know how everything works and can make all decisions solely on whether it helps them to achieve the result. Synchronising with other people is a huge overhead in any organisation.