> Pair programming.. sure.. but PP is so resource intensive and often it's better to have people focus by themselves imho.
Wholeheartedly disagree on the last part. Yes, Pair programming is expensive, but the knowledge transfer is invaluable. I would encourage people to work together on the same problem.
I've done pairing in the past, and as much as it was fun and felt productive, it was completely exhausting. I don't know how people do it day-in-day-out.
I always wonder if the pairing advocates and extroverts, and if that's why it hasn't really caught on in a field with a high percentage of introverts.
It is very tiring. When i started doing it, i was amazed how tired i felt at the end of a 9 to 5 workday. But i got used to it, and it wasn't long before it was perfectly comfortable. I think there's some sort of mental muscle you exercise by pairing, and it takes a while to develop the endurance it needs.
I do wish pairing advocates talked about this. It feels mildly fraudulent not to.
I'm not sure introversion vs extraversion is relevant. Firstly, i'm not sure they're even real things; they show up in a lot of snake oil psychology (Jung, Myers-Briggs), but i don't know to what extent they label a real axis of variation. But if extraversion means "the state of primarily obtaining gratification from outside oneself", then an extravert ought to hate pairing, because it's the same as programming solo, but with someone constantly pointing out what you've done wrong. The conversation you have during pairing is very, very different to a normal social conversation, because it's so focused on the work in hand.
> I'm not sure introversion vs extraversion is relevant. Firstly, i'm not sure they're even real things; they show up in a lot of snake oil psychology (Jung, Myers-Briggs)
Calling Jung snake-oil psych is a bit of a hot take!
Outside of that, Introversion/Extroversion is part of the Big 5 personality traits which I understand to be widely accepted and (unlike a lot of psych) replicated multiple times.
In any case, at the end of a day of pairing I find myself exhausted and have basically no desire to communicate with anyone for the rest of the day. Maybe that's something I'd get used to eventually, though I'm doubtful.
Even a couple of hours of pairing per day is a huge team productivity boost though. Don't do it "all day every day".
It's OK to say "I'll go away for the afternoon to flesh out these tests as we have discussed".
I'll say that it's less about if the PR exists or not, but by the time it's raised it should be fine to merge it pretty much as soon as it's green, because people are on the same page before the code was even written.
Wholeheartedly disagree on the last part. Yes, Pair programming is expensive, but the knowledge transfer is invaluable. I would encourage people to work together on the same problem.