I personally think one of the biggest reasons behind this is that staff are generally not incentivised in any way to be collaborative or helpful. Managers and l

I personally think one of the biggest reasons behind this is that staff are generally not incentivised in any way to be collaborative or helpful. Managers and leaders have their performance judged on things like: * how well personally connected they are too senior management staff (often based on length of time at the company) * how many metrics and graphs they produce for senior management to give an appearance of measurable and controlled productivity * how good they are at giving presentations to senior management that sell what the team is working on * enthusiasm for talking in meetings in general Then people in non-leadership positions are judged on how much they please the middle managers and team leads with things like: * enthusiasm for being talked to and managed in meetings * enthusiasm for JIRA and producing metrics * maintaining slow but predictable productivity, gradually but persistently working through piecemeal JIRA tickets Certain teams at certain companies hire on the basis of collaboration skills and technical ability rather than fitting into a corporate hierarchy, but such teams are extremely competitive and way beyond my resume and my level of knowledge. For about the 3rd time in 15 years I'm about to take an extended break from the industry. I guess I'll have to come back again sooner or later though, because I don't know how to do anything else.