7 ms·

My primary experience with pairing was not ideal. It was being used in a mentoring capacity rather than when people are more equal. I also found that the pers

by epage 5y ago

My primary experience with pairing was not ideal. It was being used in a mentoring capacity rather than when people are more equal. I also found that the person doing the mentoring usually drove which meant that the mentee just saw things whizzing by on the screen and had no idea what happened and when they did they didn't have the first hand experience to commit it to memory. I do remember a situation of hot seat programming where we had a critical problem right before release that crossed domains and three of us worked at one desk consulting the others or swapping out as needed. Again, it was worth it because of the urgency and priority but not something worth doing generally.

xapata 5y ago
An easy fix is to have the mentee drive.
- phist_mcgee 5y ago
  Now navigate to the FOO service FOO is the background event scheduler, it's connected to BAR via RPC Ok don't worry about what that is for now, just have a look at the service logs So it's a daemon that running on port 5000 You'll have to tail the logs in /var/foo/logs So type T. A. I. L, and then dash f No, the hyphen character, not literally dash And so on and so forth. It's not that a person more senior than you can't drive, but I have found a lot of time the implicit knowledge of so many systems, and topics and accreted domain knowledge can really be a productivity drain. The best pairing usually comes from equally matched individuals.
  - apotheon 5y ago
    Okay, solution: teach the person to use a computer first
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Sounds good -- I know that you're a great teacher. You'll still have those features done by tomorrow, right?
      - tharkun__ 5y ago
        I read your parent as "that guy should not be anywhere near programming, he needs to learn how to use a computer first". Okay I might exeggerate a bit but if someone literally writes 'dash' at that point, don't pair on something that has a deadline like that. Do take him aside and let him know he gotta brush up on the damn basics and that you are there for him through it but you're gonna finish that feature with a deadline first while he takes a stab at that easy bug over there.
        jjoonathan 5y ago
        Exactly. The easy fix is not to have the mentee drive.
      - xapata 5y ago
        Tell the PM that we need to go slower to get faster.
    - phist_mcgee 5y ago
      Have you ever paired with a junior before? This is definitely the kind of thing you would encounter with a fresh grad/intern.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    A software engineer at a tech company that doesn't know about commandline flags? That doesn't seem very realistic. Anyway, this person will learn that dash means - , and not make that mistake again. It's a one-time mistake. So I think the pairing helps even in this case.
    - maccard 5y ago
      > A software engineer at a tech company that doesn't know about commandline flags? That doesn't seem very realistic. Why not? 95% of most peoples work can be done in an IDE/text editor, and that last 5% is probably very exploratory anyway. I work in games, and gameplay programmers work almost exclusively out of IDEs with GUIs for source control and most other dev tools etc. > Anyway, this person will learn that dash means -, and not make that mistake again. It's a one-time mistake. Disagree that it's a one time mistake. On any given day/task there might be 5/10/15 of these. dash, ctrl + r, tab complete, !!, different shells, shebangs, flaky backend services, etc etc. If you want to teach someone how you work then yes this might be appropriate. > So I think the pairing helps even in this case. That said, I agree :) It depends though, is your goal to bring two programmers up to speed or is it to crunch through tasks right now? Because pairing helps with one of those goals but not the other
brian_cunnie 5y ago
> the mentee just saw things whizzing by on the screen and had no idea what happened That's a bad pairing experience, and I've had a handful of those in my last five years of pair programming. On occasion I've said, "Look, why don't you tell me what to do, and I'll drive?" But I think that the larger issue is that some developers are better at solo'ing than pair'ing, and there's nothing wrong with that, and at the company I worked (Pivotal), we'd find positions for the people who were more inclined to solo.

by epage 5y ago

xapata 5y ago

An easy fix is to have the mentee drive.

phist_mcgee 5y ago
Now navigate to the FOO service FOO is the background event scheduler, it's connected to BAR via RPC Ok don't worry about what that is for now, just have a look at the service logs So it's a daemon that running on port 5000 You'll have to tail the logs in /var/foo/logs So type T. A. I. L, and then dash f No, the hyphen character, not literally dash And so on and so forth. It's not that a person more senior than you can't drive, but I have found a lot of time the implicit knowledge of so many systems, and topics and accreted domain knowledge can really be a productivity drain. The best pairing usually comes from equally matched individuals.
- apotheon 5y ago
  Okay, solution: teach the person to use a computer first
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Sounds good -- I know that you're a great teacher. You'll still have those features done by tomorrow, right?
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      I read your parent as "that guy should not be anywhere near programming, he needs to learn how to use a computer first". Okay I might exeggerate a bit but if someone literally writes 'dash' at that point, don't pair on something that has a deadline like that. Do take him aside and let him know he gotta brush up on the damn basics and that you are there for him through it but you're gonna finish that feature with a deadline first while he takes a stab at that easy bug over there.
      - jjoonathan 5y ago
        Exactly. The easy fix is not to have the mentee drive.
    - xapata 5y ago
      Tell the PM that we need to go slower to get faster.
  - phist_mcgee 5y ago
    Have you ever paired with a junior before? This is definitely the kind of thing you would encounter with a fresh grad/intern.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  A software engineer at a tech company that doesn't know about commandline flags? That doesn't seem very realistic. Anyway, this person will learn that dash means - , and not make that mistake again. It's a one-time mistake. So I think the pairing helps even in this case.
  - maccard 5y ago
    > A software engineer at a tech company that doesn't know about commandline flags? That doesn't seem very realistic. Why not? 95% of most peoples work can be done in an IDE/text editor, and that last 5% is probably very exploratory anyway. I work in games, and gameplay programmers work almost exclusively out of IDEs with GUIs for source control and most other dev tools etc. > Anyway, this person will learn that dash means -, and not make that mistake again. It's a one-time mistake. Disagree that it's a one time mistake. On any given day/task there might be 5/10/15 of these. dash, ctrl + r, tab complete, !!, different shells, shebangs, flaky backend services, etc etc. If you want to teach someone how you work then yes this might be appropriate. > So I think the pairing helps even in this case. That said, I agree :) It depends though, is your goal to bring two programmers up to speed or is it to crunch through tasks right now? Because pairing helps with one of those goals but not the other

brian_cunnie 5y ago

> the mentee just saw things whizzing by on the screen and had no idea what happened That's a bad pairing experience, and I've had a handful of those in my last five years of pair programming. On occasion I've said, "Look, why don't you tell me what to do, and I'll drive?" But I think that the larger issue is that some developers are better at solo'ing than pair'ing, and there's nothing wrong with that, and at the company I worked (Pivotal), we'd find positions for the people who were more inclined to solo.