I’ve had experiences ranging from “great” to “terrible” when pairing. It’s worked best for me when I’m paired with someone whose skills are complementary to mine. Concretely: I’m very much about rigour, type-safety, correctness; the person I have in mind here is a wizard at intuiting algorithms. The combination worked extremely well: the pairer generated algorithms, and I (at the keyboard) cast them into safe/correct forms.
However, when paired with someone who eclipses me in almost every dimension, I ended up feeling a bit bad that I was simply slowing us down; and conversely I’ve also experienced pairing with someone who I didn’t feel was adding much to the enterprise, and it felt like I was coding through treacle (because the thoughts had to flow out to another person, rather than into the compiler).
In my experience, good pairs are really good, but also quite rare. You’re looking for a certain kind of compatibility.
To answer your actual question: just try it! It’s cheap to try, and you can find out very quickly if a certain pairing is not for you. (I would certainly start the exercise by making sure both parties know that “this pair isn’t working out” is not a judgement on either party.)
I’ve had experiences ranging from “great” to “terrible” when pairing. It’s worked best for me when I’m paired with someone whose skills are complementary to mine. Concretely: I’m very much about rigour, type-safety, correctness; the person I have in mind here is a wizard at intuiting algorithms. The combination worked extremely well: the pairer generated algorithms, and I (at the keyboard) cast them into safe/correct forms.
However, when paired with someone who eclipses me in almost every dimension, I ended up feeling a bit bad that I was simply slowing us down; and conversely I’ve also experienced pairing with someone who I didn’t feel was adding much to the enterprise, and it felt like I was coding through treacle (because the thoughts had to flow out to another person, rather than into the compiler).
In my experience, good pairs are really good, but also quite rare. You’re looking for a certain kind of compatibility.
To answer your actual question: just try it! It’s cheap to try, and you can find out very quickly if a certain pairing is not for you. (I would certainly start the exercise by making sure both parties know that “this pair isn’t working out” is not a judgement on either party.)