Pairing people with the same skill set? Mostly that’s just a waste. Strong disagree in my experience. Even with two "evenly matched" developers: 1. The i

Pairing people with the same skill set? Mostly that’s just a waste. Strong disagree in my experience. Even with two "evenly matched" developers: 1. The idea of "evenly matched" developers is a fallacy. They're never exactly equal in all areas. Each one is going to know technical things the other doesn't. One will be stronger on the back end, one on the front end, etc. One will know parts of the API the other doesn't. One is better at SQL. 2. Each will know tool/workflow tweaks the other doesn't. 3. Most importantly by far: this is how domain knowledge transfer happens. On any non-trivial codebase there are decisions and business logic baked into the code. We of course need to document these as well as possible via other means (comments, commit messages, whatever) but nothing compares to person-to-person knowledge transfer. To be clear, full-time pairing seems rather crazy to me. My ideal (which surely isn't some folks' idea of "ideal") would be approximately several hours per week of on-demand pairing when it makes sense. In other words, a team that doesn't pair as a rule but is eager to pair when it makes sense to do so.