> I find this hard to believe. Which country’s laws are you thinking of? In the US, at least, companies such as Pivotal and Menlo Innovations, as well as others I’m not at liberty to name, require full-time pairing. They’ve never had an issue. Your statement is also at odds with my understanding of employment law, which is admittedly at a layman’s level, but I have studied it for the purpose of hiring in Oregon.
I'm in Europe, but I've seen such law suits and threats of lawsuits over issues like this affect companies I've done projects for first hand, including at least one US company. They are very hard to make stick, because most people are not dumb enough to make statements that are clear cut enough to provide proof that the employees failure to get hired is discrimination. But that does not stop people from suing (or threatening to sue). I've seen team paralysed for months [dealing with legal issues surrounding conflicts over discriminatory hiring practices] instead of doing their jobs. I've also personally seen people walk away from threatening lawsuits over issues like this with well over a years worth of compensation just from a threat.
This is separate from the moral issue - personally I've interviewed enough neuro-divergent candidates who were qualified (and hired a few) but who'd struggle with things like pairing and I'm personally not willing to refuse to make reasonable accommodations.
> You’re losing credibility with me. I’ve done exactly what GP is talking about and it was better than code reviews (etc), not worse. Are you talking from experience, or from personal preference?
I'm talking from experience over nearly 3 decades, including direct personal experience in cleaning up the failures of teams who took short cuts because they thought pairing could replace code reviews. They catch different things. Pairing for some teams where people are comfortable with it leads to lower counts of some types of defects assuming a lot of things go right (e.g. the pairs are matched well with people who'll actually speak up and challenge each other), but pairs tends to look themselves blind to many of the same categories of failures as individual developers because they focus on solving a task and steer their view of the code accordingly rather than looking for at breaking it.
It's the same reason developer written test suites does not obviate the need for QA, and internal security reviews does not obviate the need for external pen testers, or having developers try to think about operational issues does not remove the need for SRE's or equivalent.