| I’ve been in three teams that has done Mob Programming full-time. In one team it was for two years and a half years. I have lots of side projects when I get home. Love sitting by myself coding, listening to music, running a video on my second monitor. I work on some hard problems, and get a lot of stuff done. But I have never been at a workplace where the problem was that we needed someone to grind out as much code as possible. Doing mob programming essentially means the team works on one thing at a time. It shortens the lead time for that one thing as much as possible. That allows you to gather feedback on the solution as fast as possible. Iterate as fast as possible. Which is why you feel as you are getting so much done, even though you can go a day barely typing yourself. And you can’t do this solo. It’s rare to find one person with all the skills necessary to change our system end-to-end efficiently, and have them never be sick or slip on a banana peel. IME the perfect size team has been between 2-4 engineers. And the rest of the team filling in with skills depending on the domain:
- data science
- banking
- design
- marketing
Etc. It’s not always comfortable. I’m somewhat of an introvert, and I feel a group of 3 is a lot easier to work in than a pair. But you get a lot of the right things done, and fast. There so much to be said about this way of working, upsides and downsides. Hoping to hear a lot in this post from people with experience. |