done right it's terrible, done properly in the right team it's amazing.
it's just 1 work technique. but i've never been in a team where it felt like a meeting. you're literally writing code together, i've never done that in a meeting
again, it's lost productivity and energy-draining when done poorly. it seems like you haven't experienced a team doing pair programming well, meaning full buy-in and pairing-trained.
some of the most productive teams i've been on worked 5 hours of pairing 4 days/week
“Could we pair on this? I think you may have some insight on this I don’t.”
“I’m taking two weeks of vacation starting in a couple weeks—let’s pair on a story or two so you’re familiar with the state of this code, CI, and deployment system and can step in if needed”
“I could really use a living rubber duck for this—have you got an hour or so later today?”
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> again, it's lost productivity and energy-draining when done poorly
Done well but frequently, it definitely tends this way. Doubling the people working on the same code (not in close collaboration on different code—that can be crazy-productive) needs to have a pretty huge benefit to justify that immense cost.
I have seen junior-senior pairing sessions increase the junior’s productivity by more than 2x… but not the total productivity of the pair, on a sheer getting-things-done basis. Happily the benefits carry over into non-pairing time, such that it may end up being a good investment.