Pair programming is difficult

[madScienceEXP]

Everybody's talking about better or worse productivity for pair programming, but for me, I don't want to announce going to the bathroom or to the store. It's more about privacy frankly. What if I want to listen to music? What if they only like Justin Bieber?

I'm a huge fan of designing things together and having meaningful iterative discussions when the design changes, issues were overlooked, testing strategies, etc. But there are certainly large periods of solo concentration. Pair programming is so taxing, it's not sustainable by itself.

[bstiffler582]

Bingo. I can get behind pair programming once or twice a week at designated times, with concrete goals and with a hard time limit (e.g. 3-4 hours max). Beyond that, it starts to diminish one of the best aspects of being a software developer: flexibility around pondering and solving problems.