[crdoconnor]

I find it useful for knowledge transfer. It's a good way of bringing new hires up to speed for the first week / two weeks. If you leave them to their own devices they have a tendency to get overwhelmed and fearful of continually bothering you to ask questions.

It's sometimes a more efficient way of building stuff where, for a particular task, you need a whole bunch of knowledge or information that's currently living in somebody else's head.

Also, if I'm having one of those days when I feel sluggish having another person there kickstarts me a bit...

Defaulting to pair programming for every task - especially when the conditions above are not met is a super inefficient and overbearing way of developing though.