Ask HN: What are your experiences with Mob programming vs Pair programming | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your experiences with Mob programming vs Pair programming

10 pointsajallow10 comments

I am familiar with the concept of Mop programming but, I have not worked with it. How effective is a mob of 4 compared to 2 pair programming groups?

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I work best when programming by myself. Occasionally, it's good to get someone else to look over my work, but pair programming generally doesn't work for me.

If I have an unusually high bug count (or a bug count at all, really), then it's due to lack of quiet and enough time alone to think.

Agreed with this -- having one-offs is fine, but I definitely feel boggled down when having to develop code entirely in a group for extended times.

Hasn't it been common knowledge for like 4 decades that throwing more bodies at the same problem is grossly inefficient?

I can't imagine that 4 folks sharing 1 keyboard would result in as much or even as good code as 4 people in 2 groups with 1 keyboard each?

Not. Good for knowledge transfer but not much else. The people who don't what to work will just hide in back and the ones that normally do the work will spend lots of time explaining it to the people hiding.

I've found that the extra two people are better utilized working on a other aspect of the project :)

I agree with that point! I think having 4 persons on a single computer leads to great inefficiency and a means of dragging projects behind. However, the adopters of mop programming claim to have eliminated the need for having code reviews as a separate process on the development lifecycle.

4 people are less effective than 2 people are less effective than 1 person.

The diminishing return curves for throwing more programmers at a single keyboard are really bad.

That's a point I can agree with. I would prefer to have 2 pair programming groups working on 2 separate computers than a single group of 4 working on a single computer.

Keep in mind that the target demographic of this site are college students and people who are goofing off when they should be working (or are talking on a message board when they are done for the day)

In my experience: Solo is best when you are doing grunt work. If I can autopilot, then sure.

Pair is great for when you are starting out and implementing a complex feature or tool. We generally don't do a lot of actual coding (just structures and pseudocode), but will do a LOT of whiteboard drawing and talking through logic. Multiple brains are what you want at this stage, and if you have a co-worker who complements your thoughts well, you can do a lot of great work.

And for bug fixing, pair programming is hands down amazing.

Mob programming I personally dislike, but it has its uses. I would argue this also belongs more at the high level planning stage, but it can work well when you are adding a new feature where you would benefit from a few different disciplines.

If you have a Mob i.e. a group of uneducated and disorganized people then it can really help to put someone in the front to lead them. In all other situations pair programming is more effective.

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