Due to some turnover I ended up working mostly independently for about a year at a previous job. Nobody cared one bit about the code I wrote, just the end result. Overall it was great! I was surprised at how productive I was in that time. I'm not a partiularly amazing developer, but I managed to ship a ton of work that held up quite well.

Obviously there are limits to this approach and it wouldn't work well for solving really difficult problems, but really, 99% of day-to-day development work isn't that special. A motivated and conscientious developer with average skills can get an awful lot done with minimal distractions.