The development world seen from my limited view is this...

Budgets are very tight!  So tight that no one can have an effective team to do all aspects of development.  This may not be true at Microsoft or Oracle or SAS or (fill in the blank) but where I live we have an IT team of experts.  Usually one person has the best skills in a given area and one or more people with varying skills to help back up the one skill set.

However, when it comes to programming, I'm it on my project except for one subcontractor.  The sub had to give a fixed bid to get the work and has done a great job for the money paid.  However, I need more of the sub's time, but am at management’s mercy to get the money to use his services. 

That last paragraph sounds like I work for bad managers, but that's not true!  They are excellent, but the contract we took was fixed bid so they are working with a limited set of dollars.

Back in "the good old days" when we walked to school 5 miles, uphill both ways, I worked in a group that included the CIO, 2 programmers, 1 DBA, 1 Network/hardware guy, 1 Tech Writer, and 1 Tester.  We did 6 week releases and the CIO would agree with the corporate management team on a list of 10 items we would "try" to include in the next release.  The IT group would meet and decide who would do what on the 10 items and agree to attempt all 10 or maybe only 6 or 7 or whatever we felt like as a group we could accomplish.

The DBA would actually do all the database thingies, not just backups and security.  The Tech Writer would write up detailed specs on the items, them begin writing the test specs.  The Tester would help the Tech Writer until we had something to begin testing.  We programmers would decide which parts suited our skill sets the best and begin coding.  The CIO would ride herd on the whole process and was a pretty good code slinger when he had all of his CIO duties under control.

In short, it was a team effort with all of us working to make the process a success.  In my current situation I am basically a corporate team of 1 with one excellent subcontractor helping when I can get dollars for specific duties.  Bubba's, this ain't the most efficient way to do software...

However, in today's corporate world, very few have the budgets to afford to build teams and keep them together for extended periods of time.  It used to be that you lost good team players because good job opportunities came along.  These days you loose the whole damn team every time a project closes, if you even had a team for the project

Ouch, I think sombody hit a nerve...