[timr]

It also matters a lot more when you're hiring relatively new/inexperienced people, and throwing them in the deep end. I disagree with Bill mostly because I see the purpose of testing differently than he: the point is not to catch All Of The Bugs; the point is to make it easier to confidently work on code that you didn't write.

There's a lot of counter-intuitive stuff that happens in production code for a big website, and it's not totally fair to throw inexperienced people at it without at least some safety belts in place.

[abstractbill]

Yeah, this is a fair point.

I think, as much as I dislike pair-programming overall, that's something I would prefer to use as a safety belt here (because it's only expensive for the period during which a new employee is still learning). Pair programming hasn't ever been tried at justin.tv either though, as far as I recall. I'm probably going to give it a try at ZeroCater for new engineers actually (we're hiring!).