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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."
Thought so too. Besides this my experience at pair coding (or whatever that is that you do) is that it sucks all energy. It motivates etc. so it is brilliant way to be very productive unless of course the two do not agree with each other, cannot stand each other occasionally, the task requires to be indeed two at two different places doing two (or ore) different things at the same time as there is nobody else in the team etc etc. This way of doing stuff being very exhausting cannot be done 24x7 year after year but for certain phases of the project. One of the pair having kids make it hardly impossible to continue this 100% etc. Plus: there are indeed people that cannot do it, are just not meant to do it because god did not have given them ability to do so. The advice is great but does not apply to everybody and not to all conditions so this - why not more people do that is just a silly question. Besides - this much time spent together will raise questions of different nature which in today's culture are just toxic which leads us to a whole different world of ugly altogether.
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."
Is that all? No. First, you need to find a great match for pair-programming which is already hard enough. But you need to find one who is nearby (this doesn't work all that well remotely), and who happens to work at the same company or startup or whatever, on the same team or on the same or similar assignments. Or you need to already have that coding partner and have the luxury to pick your own employer and assignment together, have the time and energy to work together on some FOSS thing, or be in a position to found your own startup. So no, I am not at all surprised that not many people end up doing this.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Jeff Dean was a friend in high school and my roommate in college for a year. He's hardly a west coast elite, even now -- I had breakfast with him a year ago and he walked like 3 miles (his choice) to the restaurant.
He's also hands-down the smartest person I have ever met. He ported a multi-player D&D game written for a Control Data Cyber mainframe -- using an incomplete printout of the Pascal source code -- to a Sage IV p-system and the VAX 11/780 when he was in high school.