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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Full-time pair programming keeps developers focused and coding, all day, every day, week-in, week-out.

Sounds like a recipe for burn-out to me. Maybe if you switch to 6 hour days, or 4 day weeks, it could be more sustainable.

I did like one thing he said though, which has nothing to do with pairing... he said they require developers to purchase their own laptops. Like a mechanic or carpenter provides his own tools. That makes some sense to me. Let people chose the tools that they are most familiar with and most productive using.

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I think critics tend to compare pair programming to those moments when they are most productive. One programmer in flow may be able to really crank something cool out in a day or so. He might even work 25 hours straight to do it, and really get it out there. If he spends the next week polishing, tweaking, and adding very little functionality, he doesn't include that in his comparison to pair programming. He did it in 25 hours, it took a pair of programmers three days, the pairs are slower, even though the pairs are done and have moved on to other, important stuff.

Pair programmers who work 6 hour days can finish a lot of useful functionality in a week or two. They also have social lives, get to take long lunches, go hiking on the weekends, etc., even though they are very productive. This is why I prefer it. Plus, it's totally sustainable, and it comes with a built-in training methodology.

I used to think that everyone really should start pairing. But I'm more in the camp now that people should form little organizations that pair and basically put everyone else out of business. If it's more productive, places like hashrocket are going to become the leading shops for software. Their employees are going to make twice the market rate, have social lives, good friends at work, interesting problems to work on, and relativley low stress. If it's not more productive, they'll probably eventually have trouble competing.

> Pair programmers who work 6 hour days can finish a lot of useful functionality in a week or two. They also have social lives, get to take long lunches, go hiking on the weekends, etc., even though they are very productive. This is why I prefer it.

This is a non sequitur. You can work solo and still get lots done, have a social life, go out for lunch, have fun on the weekends.

Bravo!

The burnout objection is laughable. Our consultants are required to bill 35 hours per week, which translates to an average of 7 hours of coding or less every day (there is billable work like meetings that is not writing production code).

We don't work weekends and we don't do overtime. Like, ever.

Only one form of burnout comes from long hours though. It can also come from repetitive tasks that require little thought, or in your particular case, being forced to approach problems in a rigid manner that isn't in your natural style.

That being said, you've made it clear that your entire team already fits your style, right down to having the same preferences in breath odour. I wonder though how much productivity is lost managing that aspect of things. :-)

When I tried it for a week I know I didn't feel burnt out. In fact I felt more alive and less tired than I had in years doing shitty waterfall work at IBM.

The reason, for me, was that at the end of a work day I went home feeling like I had actually DONE something of value that day. I felt that way every day. It felt good. By feeling good about what I had done I felt much less like I needed to work at night. I felt that I had "earned" some relaxing time away from work.

One week of anything is rarely enough to burn out.

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