Pair programming is a tool. I loved it when I was doing it only when needed. At the moment, I have to do it everyday (company policy) and dont really like it.

Pair programming is a tool. I loved it when I was doing it only when needed. At the moment, I have to do it everyday (company policy) and dont really like it. Cons - Sharing a desk for 8 hours, 5 days a week with someone who's 2 foot smaller/taller than you - there's no table height that will suit you both. - Too bad if you dont like QWERTY, you will be a minority and will have to go back to it - Same thing for your favorite text editor - No own table - people will move/unplug your laptop, notes, phone when they need another table - Every time you need to move to another work station, you have to plug in monitors, keyboard, mouse, find all the adapters, move old mugs, dirty tissues, personal belongings, ... - Pairing with a senior sounds good in theory. Reality is as soon as you start going in the wrong direction, she/he will alert you and you end up being a code monkey that types what the other person says. You dont fail and learn, solution is almost always available. There is no room for curiosity - no dig down to see how the core libraries are implemented, no playing around 'just to see if it works'. - You end up arguing for small details - "you should make it private", "yes, i was gonna do it at the end", "you can just type it now" - All my passion and curiosity for exploring new stuff is dead as I have to explain why I am reading "random code" - As you are working with a pair there is no pull requests, everything goes straight to master. It makes it hard to keep track of what was done and duplicated code shows up because the pair was not aware that some functionality was already done Pros 5 oclock and im gone! No spending time make the code shinier or cleaner! More time for other hobbies as coding now is just a job.