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The Programmers Go Coding Two-by-Two — Hurrah?
theodp writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that pair programming is all the rage at tech darlings Facebook and Square. Its advocates speak in glowing terms of the power of pair programming, saying paired coders can catch costly software errors and are less likely to waste time surfing the Web. 'The communication becomes so deep that you don't even use words anymore,' says Facebook programmer Kent Beck. 'You just grunt and point.' Such reverent tones prompted Atlassian to poke a little fun at the practice with Spooning, an instructional video in which a burly engineer sits on a colleague's lap, wraps his arms around his partner's waist and types along with him hand over hand."
We used to call that eXtreme Programming: that was the rage a while ago, then went out of fashion in favour of other agile development methods. But that happened a lifetime ago (the early 2000s :p ), and computer fashion have changed more times than I can really keep track.
I guess that the people who were actually programming 10 years ago are now managers, gurus or architects and want to bring back their happy childhood memories (id est, programming with their buddy) back to reality, imposing it on the newer generations.
Mine's been pretty much consistently <50% productivity for the pair.
Why, you ask? Because 2 senior people working on web services can knock out 2 web services in 'x' timeframe, or 1 when paired, in 'x' + 'y' timeframe, where 'y' is a number equal to or greater than 0. The same goes for any other component functions.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
No, this is a magnificent technique for mentoring, but this is *not* pair programming. I can't stress how great it is for mentoring though. Turn a Junior into a mid-level engineer real fast.