I’ve been working in programming for a few years and I think I really dislike Pair Programming; I understand how it is but I often find it mind-numbingly dull. I have a feeling I’m doing it wrong but I feel like as a part of a dev team tasks should be broken into discrete enough chunks that a single person can just blitz through the work… Maybe it’s just me, what are y’all thoughts on the matter?
Not at all. I find it useful for certain tasks, but I’m a huge introvert and spending a long period of time with someone physically exhausts me to the point where I can’t muster coherent speech or thought. Depending on the depth of thinking required too, it’s often better for me to do that individually then bring my findings to someone else to validate.
No you’re not weird, pair programming is not one size fits all solution.
EDIT: To be clear, I still find value in pair programming, but a mandatory pair programming, for me is quite absurd. It should be organically happening, for example, a junior asking for help from senior.
It’s not as bad if you use separate chairs.
If you have two devs pair programming, at least one of them is being slowed tremendously. It should be used very sparingly and only in junior/senior mentoring attempts. Putting two senior devs on pair programming is nearly always just slashing your dev productivity.
I’ve seen devs take 3 days to write code in pair programming that either one could’ve completed on their own in 4 hours or so.
I hate it. I really enjoy programming, and don’t enjoy social niceties. And I definitely don’t enjoy someone looking over my shoulder all the time.
So that leads to 2 situations: I’m programming, but someone is looking over my shoulder and stopping me constantly (or doing nothing), or I’m watching someone else program and constantly frustrated that it’s not me.
Even during an emergency I’m often better off just doing my thing solo, and the other person using their own methods to investigate and fix the problem. Chat is still available to share information and progress without it being a constant annoyance.
The only thing I think it’s really good for is learning to program, and unless the people are the same level, it’s probably only good for 1 of them.
One person doing the coding and the other just watching or doing nothing doesn’t sound like pair programming to me. That’s just working alone with someone else in the room, of course it’s not enjoyable.
Pair programming requires a fitting task and some basic rules, most importantly that the person at the keyboard doesn’t just type as they please without consulting the other person - otherwise they’ll quickly be programming alone.