The modern tech industry's obsession with 'collaboration' masks a fundamental truth about how work actually gets done. Research dating back to WWII shows that in any group, only a small fraction of people do most of the actual work while the rest provide what's generously called 'structural support.' This 80/20 pattern appears everywhere from combat to software development.

Military historian S.L.A. Marshall found that just 15-20% of infantrymen in WWII actually fired their weapons in combat. IBM discovered the same ratio in the 1960s when they learned that 80% of computer usage came from 20% of system features. Frederick Brooks documented it again in 1975 with his observation that adding people to late software projects makes them later. The collaboration industry has built extraordinarily sophisticated machinery for the social management of work without actually producing meaningful output.

The collaboration-first culture has made ownership feel antisocial. We've constructed elaborate systems - Notion, ClickUp, Slack, Jira, Teams - that create the appearance of collective engagement while obscuring who's actually responsible. The average knowledge worker switches between applications hundreds of times daily, producing staggering amounts of coordinated activity that never becomes actual output. Transparency got confused with progress, visibility with accountability, and being included in threads became socially equivalent to owning outcomes.