Chris Johnston

Siva Jagadeesan has posted an interesting article titled, “Fresher and Experienced Developers – Friends or Enemies ?” In the article he lists some of the advantages and problems of pairing freshers with experienced devs. He touches on many of the problems I have with pairing and does a much better job expressing some of my frustrations then I did.

I think I fall somewhere in between a fresher and an experienced developer, but I can definitely relate to all the problems listed. It is amazing how your morale suffers after 5 days watching someone else code cause you don’t know enough to contribute.

I have a problem with the solutions Siva gives though because they all seem to be aimed at the fresher. It takes two to have a problem and as such would like to offer up some advice to the experienced dev:

1. Be patient and allow your pair to make mistakes to the point where they get themselves in trouble. We learn best from our mistakes.
2. Even if your pair is moving slowly, stay focused on the task at hand. I really hate when I start driving and my pair immediately starts doing something on his notebook computer.
3. Ask for and accept feedback from your pair, you are not always right regardless of how experienced you are.
4. Pairing is about more then just finishing a given story card, make sure you also teach. And teach more then just the task at hand, make sure you also teach the overall context.
5. Accept the possibility that your pair may know more then you in some area and be prepared to learn from them
6. Do not just jump all over the code base, wildly scrolling through pages. Slow down and explain what you are doing and what you are looking for.

Also, one thing I think we miss is that fresher is both someone new to programming, e.g., someone just out of university, but also to someone new to the code base.