I’ve always found it pretty easy to concentrate whilst pairing but it’s likely we just have different skillsets. I can believe that not everyone enjoys pair programming, especially if your pair is difficult but I know the people I work with see the value in pair programming (devs of all levels, tech leads, architects, PMs, BAs etc).

My favourite benefit of PP worth mentioning is how much quicker code gets into our main trunk. I don’t have to make a PR, wait for the build server, wait for someone to review, make changes based off review, wait for a second build, wait for a second review, find that I am now out of date with the main trunk & rebase, wait for a 3rd build etc. With larger teams I have found this especially painful. With PP, I can simply make do my work, then merge it into the main trunk. It’s already been reviewed by the person who has watched me type each line and discussed implementation with me. Ultimately, this saves time rather than wasting it.

I think one concern is around work that is built “singlehandedly”. This is what people mean when they talk about “Silos”. Suppose you fall sick half way through, suppose you leave for a different job. Bringing people up to speed is much more difficult than having someone else who has worked with you and knows the codebase already. I think the day of the God Developer has gone. I can understand that, from a business standpoint, having that knowledge and expertise in one irreplaceable person is a scary position to be in.

I can concede that there are times where pairing isn’t the best way of working, for example if I’m trying to spit out a few prototypes of hacky POC bits, or if the work is trivial and only really needs a once over for typos (the latter I’d probably just pair for the last 5 mins and get a quick demo of the feature).

One last thing I would mention is just how dramatic all of the quitting is in your circles! Usually an email would suffice, although perhaps that’s less satisfying than symbolic gestures like cutting up keycards. I think these days you might just get laughed at for doing that.

I am sorry to hear that modern ways of working have put people you know into hospital if that truly is the case, but then I find that “VERY” hard to believe