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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.

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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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