I think most companies are pretty amenable (that is, a lot seem to fall into the trap) of having an employee who becomes rather irreplaceable. Maybe it's the gu

I think most companies are pretty amenable (that is, a lot seem to fall into the trap) of having an employee who becomes rather irreplaceable. Maybe it's the guy who makes himself responsible for the build infrastructure for the rest of the thousands of engineers, or maybe it's the guy who hacked up hundreds of thousands of lines of code years ago when the company was still smallish and which still mostly work but is now mostly on architecture (days filled with meetings with varied teams) unless something tricky is wrong and you're really glad he can still code and debug his legacy mess. It is harder at larger companies, especially because those will tend to have a higher density of managers who actively look for bus-factor-1 problems to try and ameliorate, but still. I think it's funny how at the large companies there's an inversion to your "lone wolf" claim somewhere in the promotion pipeline where to get to the next level you're supposed to show leadership and ownership of some core feature domains, you'll be working on basically one bigger thing for months at a time. Sure, technically the "team" owns it, and a few other members may have implemented some of the simpler pieces, or done QE work on it, and you probably had to have meetings with other teams about aspects of it, but everyone knows whose baby it really is and who is best positioned to add new code or debug existing code. When your team is pretty stable for enough years (quite a nice experience) everyone on the team has at least one baby + eventually passable familiarity with everyone else's; not without good reason, it's a pretty powerful way of organizing devs who don't need constant hand holding. It's not as lone wolf as literally working by yourself on your own company, but it's not like you're drowning in collaboration. As people inevitably drop out, there's often an attempt to transfer knowledge formally, because of course there are things that the person leaving knows about their special areas that are not well understood by the rest of the team or company. Companies and teams where there really is a sense of full shared ownership and common almost equal understanding of things are pretty rare, and I would bet tend to be on the smaller side.