What Your More Experienced Programming Partner Learns from You
At Atomic, we program in pairs a lot. It’s how we teach each other and learn from one another. Pairing is how we build confidence that we’re building something actually great, not just something that makes sense to me when I’m under-caffeinated. It’s also core to the way that we run our business. We like the concept so much that, when our founding CEO hung up his keyboard, his successor was a pair of CEOs.
If you’re new to programming, new to a language, or just new to a project, pair programming can be brutally intimidating. That’s especially true if you’re just starting your career and you want to make a good impression. It’s even worse if you’re a consultant who bills hourly, and you start adding up how much someone is paying for the hour you spent staring at a function definition, unsure what to do next.
When you’re the least experienced person on your team, you may have to think through a complicated problem in front of someone more experienced than you are. It’s easy to feel a bit superfluous and discouraged. Your brain spends a lot of its time monitoring your more experienced partner for clues that they know you have no idea what you’re doing (even when you do).
