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This hits on a latent suspicion of mine, which is that at its core pair programming is really just a way to make tedious programming jobs less tedious. Granted

This hits on a latent suspicion of mine, which is that at its core pair programming is really just a way to make tedious programming jobs less tedious. Granted, I say that as someone who also spends most his time working on complex multithreaded performance-critical code and development of new algorithms, and I'm partial enough to that kind of work to have some uncharitable bias. I tend to think that design by committee, even with a committee of two, reliably produces inferior results. So when really novel work is necessary a much better way to put two people on the same task is to have them both take a crack at it independently and then come back together to see what works best. Sometimes competition is the best form of collaboration.

natural219 14y ago
Well, I'm glad that you find writing algorithms not tedious, because I surely don't want to be doing that! Architecture and good software tooling are what really tickle my fancy. It's good there are people with interests along the levels of abstraction. I agree, I dislike "design by committee". However, sometimes you get to work with those magical, rare people who are both seasoned architecture gurus and have very good social and speaking skills. Working with these kinds of people is an absolute joy -- I will learn more in an hour of watching a skilled developer program than I will from a month of reading online material.