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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

This approach doesn't scale.

Pair programming once in a while can be incredibly valuable. I am glad to meet with anyone and talk over their code in person, brainstorm designs, run through a debugger together investigating it.

But if you asked me to do that for most of an 8 hour day - much less most of the time in general - I would quit the job faster than you could fill out the paperwork. Constantly having someone looking over your shoulder is a world of stress and overstimulation that I (and I suspect many others) will not stand for.

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Then you've never actually Pair Programmed. It's not "someone looking over your shoulder", it's literally two people writing the code together, one person at the keyboard and the other person saying what's next. Two brains working in tandem on the same problem space.

It works really well, but it is exhausting, and difficult to sell.

+1 for exhausting. Also my experience. Very valuable when you have to write business logic or a complex feature the business will rely on.

Definitely not good for long running work and chasing bugs.

Physical placement isn't important. Psychologically, it's the same. What it means is that for the entire duration there is someone paying close attention to (and potentially judging) everything I do. No downtime, no zoning out, focus and performance for an extended period.

IM notification from an old teammate pops up complaining about my boss? Seen.

Switch to a window with my personal email and they can see that thing I just bought or that recruiter I've been talking to? Seen.

I type a stupid thing that will never work? In the 5-30 seconds before I realize it, seen.

It doesn't matter if I trust my pair. That's not how the brain works.

Well you won't have IM or email open while pairing :) you'll be focured on the conversation you're having with your pair. They're not watching you you're collaborating

As someone who pair programmed 8 hours a day for 10+ years, it’s important to note that there is an ebb and flow. Sometimes we were collaborating fully. Sometimes one of us got up to make coffee and looked at Instagram on their phone for 20 minutes while the other tried to get tests to pass. Then we reunited and caught each other up. It’s easy to dwell on the intense part of pairing, but it’s just as important to purposefully acknowledge your humanity and expect to take real actual breaks and go sit in a comfy chair and zone out for a short while or go to a doctor appointment or chat up another person at the water cooler for a bit.

8 hours a day pairing means that pairing is the default, but it’s not the only thing that ever happens.

also: 8 hours/day pairing meant 16 hours/day not working at all in my case. Really really really not working. Not checking Slack. Not trying out some crazy idea. Not working at all.

Your experience sounds really interesting, can you tell us more ?

> one person at the keyboard and the other person saying what's next

My understanding is that there is no one person saying what's next but what's next gets decided by both people. Otherwise, the other person is just a typist.

That’s the ideal, but if you have the person at the keyboard doing too much of the planning then it’s really easy for the other person to just check out mentally.

the other person is a typist that thinks through the ideas they hear and critiques them while they are typing.

I’m all for talking through things and getting a second opinion, but when it comes time to actually crafting things, I need my own space, maybe I’m just weird

Pair programming worked well for me in college because my peers had about the same level of background knowledge and the goal was well defined. At my day job, pair programming doesn’t work as well, since the knowledge gaps in different parts of the system are too great. We don’t have a cohesive skill set.

But that's the entire point. Pair programming isn't for producing more working code in this session faster. It's that it empirically is the fastest way to erase knowledge gaps because the two of you are working on a shared artifact.

I've never pair programmed. How can one achieve concentration for "deep focus" or "deep thought"? I'm only able to do that alone. Is it a me problem, or are some people able to focus deeply with others talking to them?

There have been (extensive) discussions on this topic here [1]. I don't seem to be alone in the inability to think clearly with interruptions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059601

you are not being interrupted. your partner is thinking with you and is paying close attention to what you are doing. they will know you well enough to not interrupt you while you are focusing on something specific. they will wait for the right moment to speak up if they have something to add, and even then they will not change the focus to some other part of the task if they know that this would disrupt you.

this takes time to learn of course. and individuals handle this differently. i to can't handle interruptions, but when i am focusing a piece of code, and my partner telling me or asking me something about that same piece of code, then for me that's not an interruption. interruptions are notifications and being asked to change the focus on something different. that should not happen when pair programming.

another aspect not mentioned yet, when there is an actual interruption from the outside, one of the people in the pair can handle that interruption, while the other continues to focus. the interrupted one can then jump back in much faster than you would if you were interrupted while alone.

> you are not being interrupted. your partner is thinking with you

As the many examples in that discussion show, this is your subjective experience, with others build different than you.

To me, those two sentences side by side are in complete contradiction with how I experience the world, where the knowledge of a persons attention is distracting, like a glaring light.

But, for learning a new language/framework/codebase, I think it would work very well. The quickest, and most enjoyable, "ramp ups" I've ever experienced were just sitting next to someone and bouncing questions off of them as I explored.

>Then you've never actually Pair Programmed. It's not "someone looking over your shoulder", it's literally two people writing the code together, one person at the keyboard and the other person saying what's next.

That is literally what most people hate about it.

> Pair programming once in a while can be incredibly valuable.

> a world of stress and overstimulation

yeah so I think the thing here is that one of these is an objective outcome of pairing, and the other one is a personal preference. Which is a valid preference, but it does nothing to refute the fact that pair programming is a great solution for the issues laid out in the article.

I don't particularly like writing tests, but that doesn't stop me from doing so. I think we should think about pair programming like we think about tests: a necessary part of the process, and something most companies don't do enough.

“It doesn’t scale” and “it’s unreasonably difficult for many people” aren’t the same thing.

It scales fine to 400+ engineers. You do have to be willing to hire specifically for pairing tolerance.

I imagine it would become a different job altogether, more in the style of buddy cop movies: you'll be spending all your work hours doing every project with your partner, sometimes they code, sometimes you do, but you become a single unit for all intents and purposes.

I'd also hate it with every cell of my body, but for some it's just another way of life.

Fascinating; I find myself a lot more stressed and overstimulated when facing a problem alone than with a friend.

In my experience, pair programming is amazing as a teaching tool. Pairing a (very) experienced dev with a much more junior one will do wonders in upscaling the technical skills of the latter and - more often than not - interpersonal skills and even humility of the former.

In the last company I worked at, when a project was major enough (read, long-running and full of tricky details) to require two devs' full-time attention, they'd hole up in a flex room for weeks at a time.[0] "The cave" basically became their temporary office until they'd re-emerge ~a month later.

I spent a few weeks in the cave and it was surprisingly chill, not nearly as oppressive as it sounds. (Although, I was much more energetic a decade ago and maybe it wouldn't be quite as fun these days :-P.) I still have a picture of my madness-induced, Git hook–infested scribblings....

[0] The team's usual room was an open floor plan, which was fine with good headphones, but naturally that solution doesn't work for pair programming.

I did it full-time for 3 months and it was exhausting. I found it useful for learning a new framework (Ruby on Rails at that time) but in general I did not find it compatible with how I think and work.

my performance goes up when i pair program. even if the partner is a junior, simply because i am more focused.

Pair programming is one person coding, and one person watching.

The person "watching" should be actively engaging and helping to build the "theory of the program" (in the Naur sense) through questions and conversations. If they're just sitting there silently they aren't doing the practice. (Also, I prefer to work with both developers having a keyboard and mouse. You still should have one person driving, but the other person can jump in and directly make changes instead of having to use the other person as a puppet.)

Intense focus increases performance right up until the point where burnout or exhaustion causes performance to absolutely collapse.

That's why breaks exist.

research has shown that the longer work in one day the lower your performance gets. meaning that eg in the first 4 hours i get 60% of my work done and in the remaining 4 hours 40% simply because i get tired later in the day. (numbers made up for illustration purposes only)

4 hours of pair programming per day can therefore possibly be enough to make up for the increased loss of performance in the rest of the day.

The world is full of examples of companies that reward people who are more productive in a few hours by letting them go home instead of raising expectations and working them to death, I assume.

i get where you are coming from, but i suspect that the company that does that would also exhaust people without pair programming. bad work environments exist, and yeah, those are probably not the places where you want to introduce pair programming.

In our current environment using AI, individual development also "doesnt scale", so this "doesnt scale", 2X.

I think these proponents of AI have a very large burden on them to not just make this palatable for developers, but to actually make it "scale" as you say.

The human code review process for AI generated code will simply die due to lack of interest. Its up to the organization to find a suitable replacement or continue to pretend that half asleep disinterested developers are going to fix all this trash.

Have fun with that!

Is this not what programming alongside or with an AI agent is these days? Brainstorming, reviewing, debugging. The only difference is there's no second human building a working knowledge of the code being written.

They're not human. When I interact with AI, it's an emotionless chat bot computer program. When I interact with a human, a whole other sections of my brain necessarily light up, because they do have emotions, they do judge me and I care about those opinions about me, and they have long term memory, all thanks to the millions of years of evolution around social interactions with other humans.

> Constantly having someone looking over your shoulder is a world of stress and overstimulation that I (and I suspect many others) will not stand for.

I suspect this is a simple social anxiety you could train away.

To me pair programming is outdated. I did it for a year, and I understand that it can have some strengths, sometimes for some software. In the LLM age though, I haven't seen it, and don't think we ever will again. The stress, overstimulation, and exhaustion were real costs that the business just does not care about. "You are engineer, you not have feelings, bang keyboard harder with other Engineer."

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