[ohwaitnvm]

I’ve been pairing at all but one of my jobs in the last ten years, and love it, but I found mobbing to almost always be a driver, a half engaged navigator, and a third basically napping or distracted by a smartphone.

The devs in question were experienced in pairing and happy to do it, but I pretty much always found adding more than a second head was effectively net neutral if not negative.

So I’d love to learn how to make mobbing better for the rare times it comes up. What do you have to change or be more disciplined about to make mobbing a net gain?

[JasonCannon]

We don't have that issue really. We do remote mob programming (all day long zoom call + https://mob.sh/ ) so we see everyone while we work.

The issue we do have is that sometimes myself and my other senior dev end up Navigating too much, leaving our more junior developers to not contribute as much. When I catch ourselves doing that I'll just ask the other sr dev to step back for a little bit and allow the others to step up.

[ohwaitnvm]

Thanks for the response! I guess the big difference is being on camera. My team has been 100% remote of course since Mar’20, and split across SF and Toronto for the most part.

We use Zoom for cross discipline meetings (and nearly everyone has camera on most of the time, though there’s no explicit rule) but discord+drovio for remote pairing. Discord has been nice for the ability to drop into another pair to ask for help, or for non devs to know who is pairing and drop in as well.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that some team members play music in their headphones while pairing/mobbing. While the others can’t hear it, it’s certainly not helping our communication or focus… and it certainly feels disrespectful to me.

[LR3sRdQ]

I've done all day Zoom/VC mobs, and that sounds exhausting as hell to me. Different strokes and all, but programming this way really takes the fun out of it.

[JasonCannon]

We solve this three ways. 1. We don't do a full 8 hour day, 2. We take breaks every hour, 3. we keep it entertaining by joking around with eachother while we work.

We thought it was going to be exhausting like you said, and one of our guys even brought up that he was very introverted and didn't know if he would be able to do this. To our surprise, the days go by faster (not just because they are shorter), we get done with more work than we did before, and although yes we are tired after working all day, we all look forward to doing it again the next day.

It's true, mobbing isn't for everyone. But for us it couldn't have worked out better.

[ohwaitnvm]

Yeah I find that I can remote pair for maybe 5-6 hours a day. Catching up on non pairing work things (email and slack and whatever) takes another hour or two, and I’m beat by 4 or 5.