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    I think you hit the nail on the head with the co-worker conflict. Merge conflicts are a regular thing, but they are generally limited to a handful of files. Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 15:23
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    This sounds like a corollary to Conway's Law, and the Single responsibility principle -- i.e. that if people are working on different problems then ideally they'll be editing separate parts of the source code. Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 17:04
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    While I agree that a poor process or poor design can lead to a large amount of conflicts, I'm pretty confident that the issue is simply that the OP isn't merging in the mainline regularly. I don't agree that "taking full and complete ownership" of files is appropriate as a matter of course. I don't want my team having a constant overhead of keeping track of who "owns" what now, asking "permission" to make changes, or guessing what files they should "claim". Only rarely, when significantly rewriting a component, have I asked team members to inform me if they were going to change certain files. Commented Aug 18, 2018 at 0:40
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    ChrisW has the right idea with what I was driving at. Generally speaking Ownership in my company takes the form of application functionality, I take complete ownership of the Search Filter system as a task and as it happens, nobody else needs to touch the related files under most circumstances. My feeling is that it's very likely OP as a new starter has been given minor parts of tasks closely related to an ongoing set of tasks by another dev. Meaning the other dev is working in the same part of the codebase and they're getting in each other's way. Commented Aug 19, 2018 at 12:04
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    @Rowan Cool yeah I thought as much. Functionality separation can also help with file separation (sets of functions in different files etc) and this IMO helps with merging. Commented Aug 22, 2018 at 9:43