I worked with several Pivotal teams, and also really miss it.

I've never been as productive or had that much fun at work.

I miss it every time I review a behemoth PR, or another engineer proposes a giant design change in a PR.

Those discussions need to happen earlier

I remember starting at Pivotal and being shocked by the two mice, two keyboards (and two displays, mirrored) setup. At the previous XP shops i had worked at, we had one mouse, one keyboard, and one display (comprising two monitors) - sharing the physical peripherals made sharing and transferring responsibility completely natural. It seemed bizarre to me to duplicate them, introduce what you call mouse wars, and make it impossible to point at something on the screen. But of course, everyone at Pivotal insisted that theirs was the only way to do it!

Yeah. Now they are pairing with a chatbot.

I do alot of my work after close of business, I don’t do well in companies that require collaboration to get tasks done

I’ll pass all team player marks and metrics, but if there’s too much custom tooling, distributed knowledge and gatekeepers, my performance will suffer more than those that pair all day

Funny story, I work out of a small part of Accenture and was just today explaining to a client that this is how we work (pairing, TDD, etc.). Way back in 2018 or so we had a partnership with Pivotal and they taught us a bunch of their ways of working. It's been a challenge to maintain, especially through Covid, but a lot of the core ideas and practices are still alive. It doesn't work on every project, but man when it does it's a very nice way to do software.

I work at what used to be Pivotal, now Broadcom via VMware, and do pair programming every day. It was a bit of an adjustment, and I do sometimes miss solo dev work, but pairing does have some real benefits. It is really nice to have another set of eyes to catch mistakes you miss, and it's fantastic for spreading knowledge and onboarding new developers.