[theshrike79]

Pair programming is like guiding the mechs in Pacific Rim (too bad they never made a sequel).

You need to communicate actively and be in sync with your pair. I've seen it work _once_ with two guys who had know each other since they were kids. They were really more than the sum of their parts when pair programming.

[torginus]

I've had the same experience - I was running a cottage-business with my best friend as a teen, writing a DOS GUI app for a single customer - we did this exact sort of pair programming, and I can say with confidence in retrospect, that we didn't know how good we had it.

We were doing so many things so much better than what Ive seen as industry best practice since then, despite both of us being both very inexperienced and young.