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Comment by mleonhard | Hacker News Reader

> Over time, over years, pairing wore me down. Took a little bit more each day than I could recover. Until my life was working, and recovering from work, and then working some more.

This can be true of any demanding job.

Pairing is like running or cycling together. One person will be faster or have more endurance than the other. The slower one must set the pace or they will get exhausted quickly. For sustainable daily pairing, I would expect the team to quickly develop a hierarchy of speeds, with the lower speed person in every pair controlling the console.

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That's not true in my experience. I also participated in such an "experiment" and I'm normally the one with more endurance and speed, able to do overtime, or work on personal projects after hours.

In my experience, with daily pairing, both workers felt completely drained of energy after 4 hours (including pauses).

Pairing a couple hours a day, or a couple times a week is alright, and very productive. Doing it 5 days a week is borderline inhumane.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27082522 - this guy is cut out for Extreme Programming. If something is good, why not have it all the time, right?

We mortals, are likely more suitable for moderate programming, with infrequent informal pairing when necessary.

I don't think it's an apt comparison.

Having the same supper feels more of a way to avoid stress, to avoid making multiple decisions daily, to have some grounding in your life, to have less risk. Similar to Steve Jobs wearing the same uniform everyday to work. [1]

As said in other post in this thread, by Cthulhu_, part of the appeal of pairing is "getting out of your comfort zone". I don't think this guy wants to be out of his comfort zone for 8 hours a day.

If he were a coder, maybe "stability" would be working solo. Maybe he would have liked 8hrs/day pairing. Maybe he'd prefer start his coding around 6:00 and going home after lunch. No way of knowing.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/10/05/steve...

Not clear why this was downvoted.

It's true that the slower person should set the pace; unfortunately that doesn't always happen. I found that some of my pairs were so much faster than me, that they had to spend quite a lot of time explaining what they were doing - I was slowing them down.

But with rotation, it won't be more than a couple of days before you're paired with someone more closely-matched to your abilities.

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