4 ms·

Wow. "you should be pair programming". Terrible advice. Isn't effective in the office. Tons worse when remote.

by eweise 13y ago

mbillie1 13y ago
I wish he had left that out, only because it was obviously going to lead to lots of reactions like this. Pair programming, at least on HN/reddit, is a fairly polarizing issue. I'm in favor of it, but plenty of folks aren't, and it's really an orthogonal issue with respect to working remotely. (For the record: tmux/vim/skype has worked perfectly fine for me while remote pairing)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- technomancy 13y ago
  It depends what you're doing. If you're getting up to speed on a completely new system, you're going to waste a lot of time if you don't have someone who's familiar with the codebase helping you out. If two people have fairly similar levels of expertise in a given area, the benefit is going to be a lot lower.
  - eweise 13y ago
    Totally and its great to mentor someone for a little while or occasionally work on a problem together. Pair programming though is practice where two people work together all day everyday until one of them becomes batshit crazy or quits the company.
    - technomancy 13y ago
      I don't think it's fair to define X as "doing X badly" and then complain about people who encourage X.
- banachtarski 13y ago
  For me personally, I hate it. Mainly for ideological reasons. I believe that when I'm "programming," most of it is spent in thought or jotting things down on paper. When it comes to actually typing things on a keyboard, I've already figured out exactly what should happen. Pair programming goes against this work methodology, so I don't subscribe to it. Naysayers tell me that I can work through the "thought process" in a pair too. No, I can't. That's not how I work. I'd be happy to discuss my thoughts after I've had alone time, but that time is critical for me to get things done at a reasonable rate.
  - mbillie1 13y ago
    That is a very reasonably response, and I certainly wouldn't push the idea that pair programming is great for everyone. It definitely works better for people with a particular personality type, and worse for people with other personality types. And I think it's a shame that the industry sometimes pushes things like pair programming as a panacea - like any "best" practice or agile catechism, it only works if it works for your developers. I just find a lot of resistance to pairing from people who have never even tried it, and I think that this is unfortunate, because it doesn't have to be as awful as it's often described here, reddit, etc.
    - banachtarski 13y ago
      Yea I was careful to qualify my preference as a "personal" one. As a former educator, I believe it can be helpful in some cases, especially for people in an "exploratory" stage where they haven't learned the best way to reason about things yet. However, once individuals start performing at a level where they have particular individual methodologies, pair programming manifests itself as an impedance mismatch.

Wow. "you should be pair programming". Terrible advice. Isn't effective in the office. Tons worse when remote.

by eweise 13y ago

Wow. "you should be pair programming". Terrible advice. Isn't effective in the office. Tons worse when remote.

I wish he had left that out, only because it was obviously going to lead to lots of reactions like this. Pair programming, at least on HN/reddit, is a fairly polarizing issue. I'm in favor of it, but plenty of folks aren't, and it's really an orthogonal issue with respect to working remotely. (For the record: tmux/vim/skype has worked perfectly fine for me while remote pairing)

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
technomancy 13y ago
It depends what you're doing. If you're getting up to speed on a completely new system, you're going to waste a lot of time if you don't have someone who's familiar with the codebase helping you out. If two people have fairly similar levels of expertise in a given area, the benefit is going to be a lot lower.
- eweise 13y ago
  Totally and its great to mentor someone for a little while or occasionally work on a problem together. Pair programming though is practice where two people work together all day everyday until one of them becomes batshit crazy or quits the company.
  - technomancy 13y ago
    I don't think it's fair to define X as "doing X badly" and then complain about people who encourage X.
banachtarski 13y ago
For me personally, I hate it. Mainly for ideological reasons. I believe that when I'm "programming," most of it is spent in thought or jotting things down on paper. When it comes to actually typing things on a keyboard, I've already figured out exactly what should happen. Pair programming goes against this work methodology, so I don't subscribe to it. Naysayers tell me that I can work through the "thought process" in a pair too. No, I can't. That's not how I work. I'd be happy to discuss my thoughts after I've had alone time, but that time is critical for me to get things done at a reasonable rate.
- mbillie1 13y ago
  That is a very reasonably response, and I certainly wouldn't push the idea that pair programming is great for everyone. It definitely works better for people with a particular personality type, and worse for people with other personality types. And I think it's a shame that the industry sometimes pushes things like pair programming as a panacea - like any "best" practice or agile catechism, it only works if it works for your developers. I just find a lot of resistance to pairing from people who have never even tried it, and I think that this is unfortunate, because it doesn't have to be as awful as it's often described here, reddit, etc.
  - banachtarski 13y ago
    Yea I was careful to qualify my preference as a "personal" one. As a former educator, I believe it can be helpful in some cases, especially for people in an "exploratory" stage where they haven't learned the best way to reason about things yet. However, once individuals start performing at a level where they have particular individual methodologies, pair programming manifests itself as an impedance mismatch.