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Your second and third paragraphs have nothing to do with pair programming. They indicate crappy management (shoving people around like animals) and a crappy tea
by gruseom 16y ago
Your second and third paragraphs have nothing to do with pair programming. They indicate crappy management (shoving people around like animals) and a crappy team (nitpicky argumentation) respectively.
Your first paragraph is more interesting. How does the fact that someone else also contributed diminish pride in craftsmanship? Presumably it's the program you're proud of, so if the program comes out better, isn't that reason to be prouder? (If the program comes out worse, that's a problem.) Personally, it would drive me crazy to work with people who were constantly worrying about who contributed what. Software development is hard enough as it is. We can't afford to waste valuable cycles on that kind of thing.
My experience has been that the solitary-genius fantasy is the calling card of an immature programmer and is purely something to get over. (Just so it's clear, I'm not drawing this conclusion about you, nor about the OP.)
It may be true that co-programming makes crappy teams worse, but it also makes great teams better. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing better than a small team of smart people hammering on a hard problem together. But there's no question that it forces team dynamics into the open.
- kayoone 16y agoWell since you should change your partner at least once a day, it is about shoving around people ;)
- gruseom 16y agoThat's funny, dancers seem to able to do it without shoving each other.
- kunley 16y agoSadly, crappy management is more ubiquitous than cowboy programmers.
- thibaut_barrere 16y agoFunny, I've heard the opposite; from managers, of course :)
- kunley 16y agoAs a hacker I'm of course biased, but still I've heard the statement above from a manager in a moment of truth :)
- mchanson 16y agoI think there is plenty of bad programmers and bad managers. I don't think either profession is a lot better than the other. (I am a coder and manager)
- lucisferre 16y agoExcept that it's easy for just about anyone to spot a bad manager. A manager who doesn't actually know how to code couldn't spot a bad programmer if they fell into them.
- thesz 16y ago>It may be true that co-programming makes crappy teams worse, but it also makes great teams better. You missed "may" before "makes" in the second part of your statement.
- gruseom 16y agoThat's true. I thought of adding it last night but I was too lazy, and I'm too lazy to fix it now. :)
- yannickt 16y agoI prefer solo programming, but to me it means something different from programming without input from other people. I will ask as many questions as I can in order to get the job done. I will describe my design to key team members so it gets criticized and improved. I will ask people to review my code. But when I actually sit down to write code, I don't want anyone looking over my shoulder (with a few exceptions, such as bug hunting or prototyping).