There is two sides on this coin. Nothing beats software craftsmanship combined with domain expertise. That is what makes the impossible possible. The developer

There is two sides on this coin. Nothing beats software craftsmanship combined with domain expertise. That is what makes the impossible possible. The developers that have these skills are not a commodity. The scenario that you describe is not uncommon. It is a cultural problem, where there is no information sharing and developers "own" the code, even within a team. On the other hand, sometimes, especially in larger organisations, there are too many C-level developers and that will burn out or drive away any A- and B-level developers. The initial symptoms in the latter case is similar, with hero-developers and personal dependencies, but the difference is that the productivity slowly grinds to a halt as the code grows by copy-paste into a huge tangle of fragile code and bugs. In these kind of organisations, programming is probably also treated as a commodity.