I feel like if I would've been sitting with him I would have wasted a lot of his time Yeah I think forcing devs to pair for no reason and simply hoping

I feel like if I would've been sitting with him I would have wasted a lot of his time Yeah I think forcing devs to pair for no reason and simply hoping the magic happens... tends to waste time What you did is what makes sense to me. Be eager to pair and/or mentor "on demand" whenever it makes sense. Whenever I've written some weird/tricky code that doesn't explain itself, I make doubly sure to mentor the next coder(s) who work on it. I find it pays off handsomely. Off the top of my head, I would say that 1 hour of working together can easily replace 2-8 hours of another dev stumbling through things, trying to do code archaeology, and making mistakes that might have been avoided. Some folks would say "well, just document the code" or "write cleaner code" but sometimes that's simply not reality when racing deadlines, requirements are changed at the last minute, or you're working around bugs in external libraries or devices.