Not Waving But …

In his latest posting high profile Thoughtworker Obie Fernandez comments that:

“Truth is, pair programming is one of the only effective ways that a lot of us have ever witnessed keeping average developers from pissing away 95% of their productivity engaging in non-work such as reading and writing blogs, instant messaging, personal email, shopping online and otherwise wasting time on bullshit.”

…

“As far as I’m concerned, all the other benefits you get from pairing like continuous review and knowledge-sharing are just gravy.”

So now you know, All that good stuff about continuously reviewing code, helping each other stay focused, making sure everything is tested, avoiding blocks, solving problems faster and sharing knowledge across the whole team doesn’t really matter. No, pair programming is mainly a management technique that sets up average developers as Thought Police to enforce “good” behaviour. From the earlier comment I assume that “a lot of them” (other Thoughtworks Consultants?) have already tried key loggers, IP sniffing and surveillance cameras?

For the record a team will work hard if they get enough internal satisfaction from doing so. External factors such as threats, rewards or the Thought Police have been demonstrated over and over to fail. How you foster that internal satisfaction is where the “art” of management comes in.

I like Pairing, though it is a hard sell. Frankly, the sell just got harder, its a shame, because for a while there I thought Obie “got it”. I know, from working with them, that this isn’t the view of many Thoughtworks guys, I just hope that this sparks off a “robust” internal debate.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 7:11 am and is filed under Software Development, People, work, rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.