989 karma · joined May 28, 2013
If you're going to develop a feature in pair-programming in the exact same way you would if you'd be doing it alone, yes, it might not be the most effective thing.
If both/many programmers discuss the ideia first, implement it, correct it on the fly, and when it's done it's completely done, with no waiting time, no delaying the value, no miscommunication in comment boxes, then it's highly effective.
And on the other hand, somehow the author of the article passes asynchronous code reviews as good thing. I mean, that is THE problem that pair/mob programming is solving, imho.
Also, wow, there are very efficient build systems that all devs should really know about, like Bazel.
What we did was to put knowledge at the center stage, make it as easy as possible, pleasant to maintain, and avoid at all costs new/extra tools. We eventually settled for Notion. I'm sure you can find about notion benefits on your own, but essentially it does all that. It's super intuitive, easy and beautiful, easy to get around (albeit sometimes slow). Get everthing in the same place as much as possible, with every new tool you'll loose out (knowledge bits here and there, extra connections that stop working, or that people don't bother to check)
But getting a good information platform was only half of the story. We needed to start thinking and working differently. We decided that if we ever make a decision, or arrive at a conclusion, that's worth sharing, then it should be worth writing. And it's by doing this, and expecting all other team members to do it as well, that we arrive at this stage.
I'm sure this doesn't work for all teams, and other teams probably arrived at other, even better solutions, but this was what worked (wonders) for us.
But yeah, I wouldn't see me using this function for the reason you mentioned. It's "too wild". Perhaps now with the user profiles it would be possible to not allow messages when you're in certain modes (like "work" or "do not disturb"). Can you do that or does it have to be always on?
I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes, places, trivia in general, tech questions - reddit still isn't as good as stack-overflow for developers), Brave browser will take the ads out, and I get to choose my result. It's quite a nice experience.
(And no, I don't recommend Duck Duck Go either. It fails to show obvious results every now and then. I learned that the hard way.)