Pairing is actually great in limited scenarios where one person is an expert and the other needs to ramp up quickly from their knowledge. But at steady-state,

Pairing is actually great in limited scenarios where one person is an expert and the other needs to ramp up quickly from their knowledge. But at steady-state, it becomes a drain on efficiency. In my experience, forced pairing is something that a small percentage of people love but it burns most others out. Every company I've seen try to force full-time or even most-time pairing on people has quickly lost a lot of their good developers. Although on the plus side, they at least have a system in place for quickly ramping up new developers as they join to fill all of the openings.