71–80 of 104 posts
Does pair programming only work with friends?
I think that's much more sustainable for most. Pairing with the same person every day is sort of like sharing a snowbound cabin with them. There are very few people I get along with so well that they wouldn't grate after a few weeks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pivotal Labs has had across-the-board pair programming for years[1]. Although the folks there are undoubtedly talented, I'm fairly certain most aren't at Jeff and Sanjay's level. I don't know why companies don't do it, but it's not cost alone. Here are some of my hypotheses: 1. It seems like it would be more expensive - which might deter companies from thinking about it 2. If you're not already doing it, it's hard to…
There've been studies on the "more expensive" part, and IIRC it's about a 15% premium in terms of development time - there've been a few studies. Here's one I could turn up quickly: https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/XPSardinia.... Simultaneously, you get a bunch of benefits. (Most importantly, there's no bus factor of 1 for anything)
> On Sanjay’s monitor, a thick column of 1s and 0s appeared, each row representing an indexed word. Sanjay pointed: a digit that should have been a 0 was a 1. I was curious how he can see "a digit that should have been a 0 was a 1" in a "thick column of 1s and 0s"? Can you give a specific example. I'm not questioning that he did but I'd like to know a specific example.
Does anyone have a reference for "In 1966, researchers at the System Development Corporation discovered that the best programmers were more than ten times as effective as the worst." ? I'm seeing the year 1968 at http://thecomputerboys.com/?tag=black-art#fn-156-1 Is there a 1966 reference out there somewhere? Or perhaps the actual study was done in '66 and didn't make it into press until '68? I didn't pull the origin…
How could it be a myth? Ever see a professional sports player compete against a non professional player? Why wouldnt this dynamic exist in programming?
I'm so glad this this article (unlike so many other representations of Jeff and Sanjay's work) does not overlook Sanjay's contributions. I don't know what it is; maybe Sanjay is a weird (read: non-English) name, maybe it's that computing culture's obsession with lone hackers leaves no room for a partnership like Jeff and Sanjay's. Anyway, kudos to the New Yorker for not falling into that trap.
I think a big part of it is something the article touches on: Jeff is an extrovert, Sanjay is an introvert. Jeff is the much more visible of the two; the one who people are more likely to have heard speak personally or to have dealt with. It sounds like this is how they both prefer it, but it definitely means that Sanjay's contributions get passed over in the common discourse. I was also glad to see the article avoid…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how do you even tell something's not correct? For example in the article they had to manually examine the index and find out some words were missing. How do you detect that not on the hardware level but up on the software level?
Checksums
> The world’s most robust computer systems... used special hardware that could tolerate single bit-flips. But Google... bought cheaper computers that lacked that feature. > Together, Jeff and Sanjay wrote code to compensate for the offending machines. I'm guessing the article is referring to Google buying servers with non-ECC RAM. How do you write code to compensate for non-ECC RAM?
So Google was a company that was too cheap to buy ECC RAM, but willing to let half of their hard disks go to waste. I'm struggling to understand the logic behind this; can anyone explain?
> On Sanjay’s monitor, a thick column of 1s and 0s appeared, each row representing an indexed word. Sanjay pointed: a digit that should have been a 0 was a 1. I was curious how he can see "a digit that should have been a 0 was a 1" in a "thick column of 1s and 0s"? Can you give a specific example. I'm not questioning that he did but I'd like to know a specific example.
For example the high bit in blocks of ASCII text will always be zero. In a binary dump it would appear as a column of zeros.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pivotal Labs has had across-the-board pair programming for years[1]. Although the folks there are undoubtedly talented, I'm fairly certain most aren't at Jeff and Sanjay's level. I don't know why companies don't do it, but it's not cost alone. Here are some of my hypotheses: 1. It seems like it would be more expensive - which might deter companies from thinking about it 2. If you're not already doing it, it's hard to…
There've been studies on the "more expensive" part, and IIRC it's about a 15% premium in terms of development time - there've been a few studies. Here's one I could turn up quickly: https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/XPSardinia.... Simultaneously, you get a bunch of benefits. (Most importantly, there's no bus factor of 1 for anything)