Would you accept a job offer where pair programming is mandated 100% of the time? I have no real experience pair programming so would like some perspective.

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I worked in a role that was 100% pair programming all the time. It was a bit exhausting, but I learned suuuuper quickly by pairing with more senior engineers and grew in my career by reaching younger engineers and training them.

In the end I realized it wasn’t for me but I also realized software engineering wasn’t for me so take that with a grain of salt

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I'd try it, curious what it's about. Sounds like a great way to keep each other honest on writing cleaner code and building good habits. Don't know how it's supposed to work in practice since you can't be "on" all the time, but would chance it. Also curious about mob programming, that sounds like a hoot

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For me personally pair programming tires me out, I couldn’t do that 100% of the time, that’s nuts

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For a while at my job they had us pair program 100% of the time and it wore me out. I started to not like coming to work because of it. Luckily I eventually got a new manager and didn’t have to worry about it anymore. I think it has some good benefits like knowledge sharing and can produce higher quality less buggy code, but 100% of the time is hard

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Probably not, but it depends. Mandating details of the development process "100% of the time" is inflexible and micro-manage-y. I would take it as a sign that leadership seriously distrusts their engineers.

That being said, it depends a lot on the situation. If this is a safety-critical aerospace application or something, then that level of distrust could be appropriate as the consequences are often literally life and death.

Or, if the pair programming process is a replacement for code review (which would be mandatory many other places), that could be an acceptable trade-off. I wouldn't rule it out but it's exotic enough that I would approach it with a lot of suspicion. If equity is a major part of your compensation you should be wondering whether this will impede future hiring as well.

If this is some tiny startup making an app then my gut is the founders/leadership are controlling nutjobs and I would be inclined to run screaming.

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As I mentioned, I could possibly see it working if it was intended as a replacement for code reviews! I still have (fairly strong) reservations about it's ability to fully serve as a replacement, but it's at least a coherent idea.

I've heard of XP, though it always seemed quite fringe to me, and unlike agile I haven't really heard of any big shops adopting it fully (although obviously many parts of it have been broadly adopted). In particular this is the first I've heard (in ten years of tech career) of any company using pair programming as more than one of several options that engineers can use (or as a training tool). E.g. people often pair at my current company, but it's definitely not required. You learn something new every day, I guess!

My comment about trust was more about the "mandatory 100% of the time" bit. It's one thing to mandate that two engineers look at every line of code before it goes into production, but it seems like a very different thing to me to mandate that no engineer so much as touch their editor on their local machine without another engineer looking.

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tribalscale?

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