Pair Programming Antipatterns
Pairing is great for some tasks, like higher level design and whiteboarding sessions.  But when it comes to implementation (coding) time I really dislike it.<p>I think ultimately, at the end of the day, I expect and hope that every human I work with is a competent, solid individual contributor and does not require a co-driver to produce meaningful work.<p>I definitely see the value in pairing for imbalanced situations (junior and senior, new engineer and tenured), but such sessions should have the goal of getting each person to operate independently, hopefully sooner than later.<p>Pairing just for the sake of pairing is an encroachment on many things I love about software (the ability to think about a problem deeply and quietly, the ability to work independently, the ability to check my Twitter feed as often as I damn please).  I’m really glad the pairing fad seems to be dying down in general!