At one of my former employers there was an anecdote about a "dictator" programmer (I think "hermit" may be a more accurate term).

The story is this programmer was assigned a fairly long, complex task (iirc, analysis of a helicopter rotor in hover). One of the requirements was that this program run on a CDC 6600 or 6700 (which model doesn't really matter). After several months of great demos and the programmer's wonderful progress reports during development on the company's IBM 360 mainframe, the programmer said it was ready for delivery.

He showed the managers his code.

It was in IBM assembler.

The company had to return a fairly large chunk of cash to the contracting agency.

And, no, it wasn't me. It was before my time there. In any case, I was sensible enough to realize IBM assembler won't work on CDC machines roughly 1 week into my first programming class.