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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

Maybe for some jobs. But for the majority of software jobs? Not really.

I can't really tell. I mean, there's enough people on HN who say they do pair programming at work, and some even that they do whole projects almost exclusively in some sort of group coding sessions - to me this seems like a bizarro world, so what do I know about majority of software jobs?

For me personally, every software job I've done so far - including both the ones where I was one of few (or even the only) coders in the company, and ones where I was but a small cog in a multinational corporation - all of them had an availability component. Usually in the form of being there to answer some question, or help someone who's blocked or slowed down by an issue I'm the best suited to resolve (or the only one in the team/branch/company who can).

I've only had successful paired programming in one situation and it was amazing. I believe it worked because we were friends and at the same knowledge level. In three days, we ripped through a project that should have taken a month. Our 'C' code was perfect because there was always someone looking at it in real time and catching the errors on the spot.

I do not think that I will ever encounter this level of productivity ever again.

It’s beautiful when that happens.

I've done a lot of pair programming with mentees and it's very rewarding. They usually learn a lot and it helps building a relationship with them. Bonus points if they see you struggling with a problem/bug.

It depends. There are some people who bring a lot of value by just being there to answer the occasional questions. When I'm oncall and I know that some colleagues are on vacation, I'm definitely more tense. In an ideal world, knowledge would be spread within the team, but with turnover it's hard to reach and maintain that state.

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