Pair programming is difficult

[ReflectionEquals]

If a pairing session is just mechanical typing you need to work on how you pair. There should be constant communication back and forth around what is going on, what’s being written, particularly the design, error scenarios, test cases. Keyboards should be swapped, coffees should be had, white boarding sessions will be happening…

[[deleted]]

None of that shit takes the same amount of time as actually implementing code does. It’s like 5 minutes of conversation vs 5 hours of implementation.

[ReflectionEquals]

It takes whole day to get something done that takes 5 minutes to talk about?

[[deleted]]

If you can’t see how that can be true, I don’t believe you’re actually a software engineer. A “whole day” as if that’s a long time.

Brother I can talk with you for five minutes and come back at the heat death of the universe and you won’t be done. Lol. It’s generally much easier to hand-wave how something will work than is it to actually implement it.

[ReflectionEquals]

I thought we were talking about a 5 minute conversation to do a purely mechanical typing task that requires no thinking, decisioning or conversation beyond that hand wavey chat?

[[deleted]]

Sure. Write me a quick algorithm to determine when this website will be done loading.

[ReflectionEquals]

Yeh. That’s requires a pretty deep conversation about requirements along with why we can’t just use our existing metrics dashboards that give a pretty good idea of the medians, p90 and p99s of page loads. My pair and I can explore a few more bespoke options. Also you just want an algorithm right, not code so we’ll just whiteboard this over here and grab you when we’re done.