The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
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The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
1–10 of 308 posts
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#2“Teams had half as many workstations as they had engineers.”
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#3“Teams had half as many workstations as they had engineers.”
Yes, that's how pairing works: two people, one keyboard, one workstation.
Having done this for a while, I wholeheartedly agree with everything the author says. It's great for software quality and productivity (among other things, it's much harder to slack on HN), but it's also incredibly draining and definitely not for everybody.
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#4I could deal with this for maybe a week. 6 years is just mind-bending. Incredible endurance/tolerance.
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#5How the heck can people work like that for 8 hours? I start to get very worn out at 2 hours of conversation.
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#6This story should be in the dictionary under "Cargo cult".
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#7> Over time, over years, pairing wore me down. Took a little bit more each day than I could recover. Until my life was working, and recovering from work, and then working some more.
This can be true of any demanding job.
Pairing is like running or cycling together. One person will be faster or have more endurance than the other. The slower one must set the pace or they will get exhausted quickly. For sustainable daily pairing, I would expect the team to quickly develop a hierarchy of speeds, with the lower speed person in every pair controlling the console.
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#8Is it just me or is it trivially easy to get all the benefits the author describes without the downsides? Maybe just do it fewer hours for fewer days. Build in enough time for full recuperation. I'd say half as many workstations as people is definitely asking for trouble.
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#9As someone who worked in an all pairing shop for two years (run by a bunch of former Pivots), I can confirm it’s pretty draining, though my experience wasn’t nearly as bad.
I actually liked pairing a lot of the time, and still think it’s an excellent way to onboard into a new code base, even in a non pairing shop (I even miss it sometimes!). For me, the main drawback after a while was that I felt like I was less efficient when pairing on stuff I knew how to do, and my personal growth as an engineer was stunted because I could always lean on a more experienced pair. Since that was my first eng gig, my second job had quite a steep learning curve as I had to figure out how to debug and navigate on my own, without talking through it out loud.
Re: The mortifying ordeal of pairing all day
#10“Teams had half as many workstations as they had engineers.”
Yes, that's how pairing works: two people, one keyboard, one workstation. Having done this for a while, I wholeheartedly agree with everything the author says. It's great for software quality and productivity (among other things, it's much harder to slack on HN), but it's also incredibly draining and definitely not for everybody.
Literally half the number of workstations. No option but to pair. I would find that oppressive.