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Comment by weeksie | Hacker News Reader

I was happy to see he mentioned "pair" reviewing. I detest pair programming but pair reviewing is excellent. Whenever the time and culture of a place permits, I do everything I can to walk through my pull requests with one or two people. It's such a high value activity, especially when it comes to teams with a good mix of junior and senior people.

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> I detest pair programming

why?

I don't like it for myself because I don't work well that way. I don't like working at companies that use pair programming because most of the code I've seen come out of pairing sessions is not very good. I realize that's likely to start a religious war in certain areas but I've been doing this for 20 years and that's been my experience so far.

I think pairing sessions can be great for teaching or for getting some needed distance from a problem, but as a mode of production I haven't enjoyed my experiences with it.

One rarely mentioned thing about pair programming is that it's a learned skill.

If you put two arbitrary programmers in front of a computer and ask them to pair program, you'll probably end up with two annoyed people, and not much code.

I was fortunate to join a team of experienced pairers who showed how it's done, and after ~3 weeks of ramping up, I was fully into it.

The failure mode I usually see on experienced pairing teams is overly complex code. There's a certain flavor that I can usually pick out and be pretty sure that a couple of Pivots or Carbon5 or whatever pair shop has been working in a codebase. I wish I could be more specific about what sets me off, but I've called it blind enough times to think that there's a real effect.

Not that single coders don't produce weird code, just that I've not experienced a situation where pairing has been a win—with the BIG exception of doing code reviews.

I learned from Pivots, so maybe I write that kind of code :)

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