Oooh I made Hacker News

Reputation of the comments section is as advertised

The people who think pairing makes you less productive continue to be hilarious

Actually lemme just live-tweet this

Okay so they all use "he" for me, which, flattering! I'll take it!

Three comments in they're arguing about what being in the Marines is like

'By "pairing", I mean that a ticket is assigned to a pair, who complete it as a pair.'

This sounds like a *nightmare* oh my god

This whole "assigning tickets to..." business is the number one thing that freaks me out about The Rest of the Software World

"Pull systems" are probably the practice I'm secretly the most hardcore about, and it's one that you don't see talked about much

Ah and now they're arguing about code reviews

"I can't even conjure up a world where pair programming is effective in my imagination."

There are some real limited people out there

OTOH the comment immediately after that explains how to do all the things the first comment says can't be done in a pair

"In my experience, I've seen pairing work in the context of an experienced engineer mentoring a junior"

I hear this a lot but it's actually one of my *least* favorite types of pairing. IME this tends to be one of the differences between the "occasional" and "lifestyle" pair-ers

"What worked very well was to pair for conceptional problems, like architecture and defining modules and their interfaces. Commit some types and pseudo-code.

We’d then break away and work at our own speed and in our own style using the common foundation."

Really like this

'Since everyone vocally thought it was a "waste of time", there was a Fight-club-style "rule" where we couldn't talk about the downsides in public or even in Scrum meetings.'

Bonkers. Good example of that pairing fragility I mentioned.

"This is obviously scary at first because someone is going to watch me code! It turns out that it is perfectly normal to use google/stackoverflow to write programs, and I actually found the experience reassuring once I got past the shock of having someone look over my shoulder."

"I just can't fathom that. How could the 4 hours 'pairing' negate the fact that one of you can't work for 4 hours?"

The idea that engineer productivity is a linear function of engineer-time-at-keyboard is one of the most pervasive, damaging brain worms in our industry.

"Why is any design happening while programming? Seems unwise to start programming before you have designed the thing you are programming."

*falls off of their chair, laughing hysterically*

"Opt-in for both sides seems like the best option. You should pair program with someone with whom you get along."

Accurate. Mostly. More nuance here than can be discussed on Twitter, making a note for a longer essay.

"Some mornings I would wake up and really not want to pair, but I'd do it anyway because its what we agreed we'd do, and after an hour or so, I got over it and we were super productive. Sometimes I miss it, especially since I'm mostly working on my own these days."

Saaaaame

"Then eventually that teammate moved to a different team, and suddenly I was doing a lot more stuff on my own and... I learned WAY faster. I suddenly realized how dependant I was being when we were pairing all the time."

Also underdiscussed.

The folks who are like oh no, Pivotal sounds like a cult, red flag red flag

(1) Read some ethnographies and get back to me
(2) Never been in a cult that paid better!

As @jacques_chester says, "Kool-aid excellent, would drink again."

"How the heck can people work like that for 8 hours? I start to get very worn out at 2 hours of conversation."

Pivotal did so much for my self-knowledge and my knowledge of how other people can be different from me, lessons it seems like a lot of HN commenters could use

"To my experience PP is to a large extend a way (for the management) to make sure that people are not slacking."

This isn't wrong either

"Another benefit is the ability to work productively in the noisy Great Hall offices into which careless management and high office rents ...confine us. Instead of requiring the dead silence I need for solo concentration, I only need to be able to hear my pairing partner"

Yes!

"If the main issue is burnout, then what's up? Even working solo you can burn out, so I don't think that's a valid argument unless someone can convince me that specifically pairing is causing the burn out."

The most valid criticism of my essay IMO

"The biggest thing is you need a team that can trust and support each other."

Accurate. Hardest problem in software engineering.

"I think what would alleviate most of his issues..."

followed by a list of stuff I was... doing

Good note to end on:

"XP is the feral cousin of Scrum."