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The Friendship That Made Google Huge (newyorker.com)
Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company -- and the Internet. An anonymous reader writes: The New Yorker has profiled Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, two of Google's most storied developers and to date, the company's only Senior Fellows, the highest level Google awards to engineers. The article dives into some of Dean and Ghemawat's successes at Google but focuses on their deep and collaborative friendship -- particularly exploring the power of programming with a partner. "I don't know why more people don't do it," Ghemawat explains. As Dean points out, all you need to do is "find someone that you're gonna pair-program with who's compatible with your way of thinking, so that the two of you together are a complementary force."
If you assume that there are approximately 16 general hardware configurations humans tend to cluster around, there are approximately:
* 16 combinations that are *golden* for pair programming. Say, INTP + INTJ (probably the most ideal, golden pairing of all)
* 16-48 combinations that are likely to be subpar at best. Say, INFP + INTJ, or ENTJ + INTP
* at least 128 combinations likely to be flat-out dysfunctional, like INTP + ESTJ
The point being, you can't pair by HR or management decree or force it to work. When you match up two programmers with complementary personality types, of roughly equal skill, it's magic. Nearly every other combo ends up being a net drawback, handicap, and liability.