This works until it doesn’t.

I had the displeasure of working with a pair that side-channelled everything. One was smart but lazy (and thus sloppy), and the other was out of his depth. Made for a bad work environment for everyone else, but I guess they were happy. Ran the show between them by tag-teaming the manager with the “solutions” they came up with, and holy shit were some of them catastrophically and comically bad because they kept designing in a vacuum.