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(via lucius)

In one of my previous jobs I worked in an environment where pair programming was briefly foisted upon me, and I’ve never been more sure of my absolute distaste for anything in my professional life. While its defenders would undoubtedly allege that this is because I’m an egotistical cowboy coder who simply can’t handle collaboration, my experience was that far from producing the best possible code, pairing frequently forced my partner and I into hasty technical decisions we regretted not considering more carefully later. Ruminating on design should be a healthy component of any good programmer’s day, but full-time pairing can make the certain amount of “staring into space” time every programmer needs to get things right excruciatingly awkward.

This is not to say that I’m not open to collaboration or feedback—far from it. I love talking designs over with colleagues, and my personal preference is for a review process where everything is developed on branches and only merged to master after review by at least one other person on the team. I feel that this achieves a lot of the reputed benefits of institutionalized pair programming without the awkwardness (and, I might add, a lot more efficiently).