Nat Bennett simplermachines.com

What happens when you pair all day, most days, for years?  ↦

There are obvious upsides to pair programming. This post from Nat Bennett shares both the ups and the downs of pairing all day for years…

So I paired all day, most days, for about five years. This had a lot of upsides, far more than I can list here. There’s a standard list of benefits and drawbacks to pairing that you might be familiar with, but the impact of pairing, especially pairing that much, goes much deeper than its impact on the code, on the particular work the team delivers that week.

Nat goes on to share when pairing took more than it gave for them.

Pairing requires being vulnerable, to another human being, for hours at a time. Intimacy, both physical and mental. I had to share space, decisions, thought processes, and often feelings with this person. … This never stopped being draining.

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.


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