Sometimes I feel like people online hate all their coworkers. Thankfully, such people have not been highly represented amonst those I've worked with.
AI doesn't make that very easy if you're just two people staring at an agent, but I think a lot of people who aren't already senior are going to hit a wall they can't climb when their experience limits what they are capable of doing with AI.
As with many things, usually the bad experiences with collaborative methods come from a specific implementation and those experiences become the bias.
But, it’s not 2x. Companies are cheap, they don’t want to pay for it.
But I agree with OP that when comes the time of sitting down and writing the code, it is a solo activity. I want to lock in and not see multiplayer cursors or avatars popping up around the editor. The part before and after that are for collaboration, but writing your piece of the code is (or at least I like it to be) solo.
All of these are reviewed before commit.
The 'interrupting' while coding is the shitty part (I agree with you), not having someone working with you.
This process respects each other's time and allows each person to visit the relevant pieces without interruption. The common rebuttal to this is "Slack messages are too interrupting!" and my response is: ignore the message until you're in a good spot to address it, or if you can't spend meaningful time on it yet, just reply with an "I'll check this out later, thanks!"
The idea that we have to sit on a video call in silence while losing the ability to think and write privately is such a huge distraction. Half of my mental bandwidth is occupied with self-consciousness of being "watched", or if I have my video off, it's the idea of being present and tied down by simply being there.
As someone with ADHD, those circumstances do not mix and eliminate any possibility of being productive because it's too distracting on all fronts. Not to mention, I need intense music to really get in a flow state. You might be surprised by how many engineers feel this way because they similarly experience neurodivergent realities around this.
I cannot stand pair programming, but I don't begrudge that it might work for some.
Like, not as a rule. There are times when it would be helpful to have my trusted coworker helping to work through something. The answers aren’t all obvious and we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. We’ll feel it out as we go. He has better instincts for some stuff and I have better ones for others. We’ll get there better and faster pairing.
But most of the time we have our own stuff to do and have our respective things well in hand. Then there’s no reason to force a pair programming situation.
I like my neighbors and love to spend some time being nice to them. Pair programming is the equivalent of being forced to live with a random neighbor in your home and you both still pay full rent/mortgage of your respective homes.
- antisocial people
- larpers and students and shit who don’t even have a job where they write code but comment like they do
- people who don’t do shit for 3/4 of the day and don’t want to be accountable for that
- people who work with too many idiots
Probably lots of other reasons. Personally I think it’s fun and useful, but I wouldn’t want to do it exclusively. Maybe scheduled hours a couple times a week. LLM aided development can be very similar experience.
Also a great teaching tool.
Big part of my job currently is taking slop level Pinocchio prototypes and turning them into a real boy. I’ve decided that I’d much rather have all of the conversations these people have had with Claude when creating the project than the final code artifacts. Hopefully we get more tooling in that direction.
ANTISOCIAL people doesn't care about society, are harmful towards other people, break laws, etc.
Dictionary definition #1 from dictionary.com for “antisocial”
> unwilling or unable to associate in a normal or friendly way with other people.
Furthermore, were you or the original pedant actually confused by what I meant? I seriously doubt it.
This idea that we need to be married to other co-workers throughout each day has all the same dysfunctional attributes as a nanny state or a daycare, where employees are treated as untrustworthy and needing to be monitored at all times.
The fact that talented engineers are able to contribute meaningfully, with few errors, and with brilliant solutions, all on their own, is proof enough that coding in solitude is a completely reasonable preference, that's shared among most of the engineers I've met in my career.
There's no reason to be so dogmatic about this.
NO TOM I DONT WANT TO FUCKING MARRY YOU GOD FORBID, ME, A TRULY TALENTED ENGINEER AND GENIUS, TRY TO GET ANYTHING DONE FUCK THIS FUCKING NANNY STATE BULLSHIT as you return to clipping your toenails in the office
I wish I were this insufferable, alas.
Truthfully, I don't mind pairing on something if someone needs help and doesn't mind doing it asynchronously instead of sitting on a video call all day pointlessly when Slack will work just fine. :)
The reason I went to hyperbole with this one was because a prior startup I worked for required everyone to pair on every ticket, whether they liked it or not. I simply refused, and they were fine with it, because they liked the work I did. If I needed to collab on anything, I'd just talk to the other engineers. And guess what? We survived and did amazing work together as a team!