Thanks for your response! While pair programming doesn’t necessarily work for all engineers or for all companies, we have found that in our case, it does deliver better code. (There are many studies that back up this claim, including the study cited in the body of this article).

At Connected, we have an incredible team of engineers, but not every single engineer is an expert in all languages and problems. And the fact that technology is changing quickly, only adds to the need to be constantly “learning on the job”. To tackle this problem, we hire our engineers not only based on their expertise in programming languages or platforms, but also on their ability to problem-solve, which is extremely valuable.

Our pairs also don’t have one person assigned as a driver, and the other as a navigator, precisely to avoid having one person looking over the shoulder of the other. We encourage our pairs to constantly alternate throughout the day. We also switch up our pairs throughout projects to continuously spread knowledge and avoid silos.

Most importantly, we see the benefits of pair programming in the quality of our work. The majority of our projects ship with little to no bugs, due to our pair programming practice. Our clients are happy with our work because we are shipping better products.

For pair programming to work well, you need a strong team, which is something that we are really proud to have at Connected!