Echoed. I've done very limited task-specific paired programming and it's been okay, and I got enough out of it to see how it may be a good way of operating for some folks, but not as a matter of routine for me. It would be awful. I just don't approach problem solving in a way that lends itself to having to communicate what & why I'm doing something a certain way as I do it. It takes too long to explain. After the fact? Sure, I can explain and document quite clearly, but not while peeling the onion and sometimes boring through a few layers to come out of the current one at a different point. I don't think this makes me better or smarter, just a different method.
I think the GP post (GGP?) about the utility of sharing expertise is a good one, though I think that can be done w/o it being 100% all the time as well. It probably also depends on the nature of the tasks and complexity of the system. There may be jobs that really do optimize better w/ a lot of paired programming, and I'm just not a good candidate for those roles. We all have different niches in which we achieve our best performance.
