I used to be a zealot. I had found the religion of XP, and I enforced pairing on teams I was hired to coach. Many people were happy to be exposed to it, but many weren’t. Of those, some were better for the experience, some weren’t. In either case, it was massively disrespectful of me to force it on people. Certain kinds of people are drawn to programming. Asking some of those people to pair all day every day is tantamount to asking them to switch careers. I for one don’t have the emotional energy for it any more. Having said all that, I would encourage any skeptics to give it a try, in the right environment with the right teammates. It can really teach you a lot in a short period of time.
I feel the more general lesson here is that zealotry in our industry is almost always a bad thing. Whether it be in technology choices, development paradigms, project management techniques, training strategies, or even just how you deal with your staff and coworkers.
Whenever I come across a zealot in a professional setting, I'm fairly certain they're intentionally ignorant toward better ways of tackling certain problems (big red flag).
I agree, although I would qualify your last statement a bit to allow for (a) the zealot is usually well-intentioned, and (b) the zealot is usually not intentionally ignorant, but rather hasn’t yet learned that context matters.
I used to love the idea until I really understood what people meant by it. It would be a career change and I'd hate it.
What I want is a wingman, not a co-pilot. Someone I'm paired with who learns my code intimately and I learn theirs intimately and we are always supporting each other in PRs and design chats. But ultimately we fly our own aircraft our own way.
I'm glad I worked in a pairing-heavy environment for awhile but I'm very glad I no longer do. I learned a lot incredibly quickly from the more senior folks I was able to pair with at the time, but the idea of doing it full time now fills me with dread.
In general, I'm happy to say "to each their own", but pairing is very often not a personal choice. Your zealotry may well affect me! Happily, pairing doesn't seem to be taking the industry by storm at the moment, so I'm not too worried about it, but when I started my career (mostly in Ruby) it seemed like a real possibility, which I came to fear the more I realized how poorly it suited me emotionally.
