Very few things bring people closer together than dealing with adversity together. It’s easy to enjoy good times with others, but people truly come together when they work through tough challenges as a team. You never really get to know someone until you see all sides of them—when they’re frustrated, excited, confused, and celebrating small victories.
Pair programming is a lot like this. When you put two software developers together to solve a problem, it brings them closer together when they solve it together. You get to know all aspects of your partner quickly: how they handle stress, how they deal with differences of opinion, and how they react to the pleasure of winning small battles.
Breaking Through the Initial Tension
There’s always a bit of anxiety when you first put two developers together who don’t know each other well. It can feel like they’re sizing each other up, wondering who’s going to take the lead or whether their skills will measure up.
But that’s really not how it should be. When you’re both focused on the problem at hand and spend less time worrying about whether your skill sets are up to par, you free yourself to truly enjoy the benefits of two minds coming together to create real value.
Building Rapport Through Shared Experience
One thing I’ve noticed I do without realizing it is announce what I perceive the other person is feeling as my own feeling. When someone hears you say you feel the same way they do, they tend to become more comfortable with you. Defenses drop, and collaboration becomes natural rather than forced.
“This part of the code is confusing me too.” “Yeah, I’m not sure about this approach either.” “I think we’re both overthinking this.”
These small acknowledgments create a shared experience that builds trust quickly.
The Focus Factor
When you’re pairing with someone, you become completely focused. You don’t want to waste the other person’s time, and they’re not going to sit idly while you check email or IM with someone else (at least, I hope not).
This forced focus is actually one of pairing’s hidden benefits. It eliminates the constant context switching that kills productivity when working alone. You’re both committed to the task, and that shared commitment creates momentum.
The Skill Gap Challenge
Finding a good pairing partner can be challenging. If you don’t find someone close to your skill and experience level, the session can become more like mentoring than true collaboration. But even this has value.
With just a few mentoring sessions, you can quickly level up the entire team’s skill set. More seasoned developers shouldn’t feel like they have to slow down so the rest of the team can keep up. With consistent pairing, everyone comes up to speed much faster than they would working alone.
Different Types of Pairing
I’ve experienced several different pairing dynamics:
Expert-Novice Pairing: One person teaches while solving real problems. The novice learns not just syntax, but thought processes and problem-solving approaches.
Peer Pairing: Two developers of similar skill levels tackle problems together. This often produces the best solutions because both people contribute equally.
Cross-Domain Pairing: Frontend and backend developers working together, or someone from a different team bringing fresh perspective to a problem.
Each type has its own rhythm and benefits.
What Makes Pairing Work
The best pairing sessions I’ve experienced share some common elements:
Shared ownership of the problem: Neither person is “helping” the other—you’re both equally responsible for the solution.
Comfortable disagreement: You can challenge each other’s ideas without it becoming personal.
Regular role switching: The person typing (driver) and the person thinking strategically (navigator) switch frequently.
Celebration of small wins: When something works, you both feel the satisfaction.
My Experience So Far
I’m definitely not a seasoned veteran when it comes to pairing, but in the last little while at our studio we’ve gone head-first into pairing, and I’m really enjoying it.
It’s exciting, and it feels like we’re producing more, much faster, with a higher quality bar. But more than that, it’s changed how our team relates to each other. Problems become shared challenges rather than individual struggles.
The Unexpected Benefits
Beyond the obvious benefits of code quality and knowledge sharing, pairing has taught me about collaboration in general:
Trust builds quickly when you’re vulnerable about what you don’t know.
Two perspectives on the same problem almost always produce better solutions than one.
Teaching reinforces learning—explaining your thought process to someone else clarifies it for yourself.
Shared victories feel better than solo achievements.
Why This Matters
In an industry where we often work in isolation, pair programming reminds us that software development is fundamentally a human activity. The code we write is just the artifact—the real work happens in the thinking, discussing, and problem-solving we do together.
Those small encouraging wins you get from solving problems together? They compound. They build team cohesion, improve code quality, and make the work more enjoyable. And in a field where burnout is common, finding joy in collaboration might be more important than we realize.