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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.)

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