Wishing for the Sound of Silence

Why on earth would someone writing code want a quiet place to think? An experienced consultant expresses it this way:

Pair programming appeals to fresh-faced young programmers who want to bond a little too much, people who spend too much time ˜being just mad mate , running around being zany, mistaking this for creativity. The best programmers I know want silence, as they are having ˜hard thoughts . They achieve their magic by ˜thinking about the problem , not playing around waiting for the gods of creativity to give them a bolt from the blue, whilst they play Kerplunk and talk about why Postman Pat is so cool. ^[7]

Of course, Ron Jeffries thoughts on the topic are somewhat different and bear repeating:

GROUCHO  

I think maybe concentration is the enemy. Seriously. If you re working on something that is so complex that you actually need to concentrate, there s too much chance that it s too hard. ^[8]

Jeffries comment reveals a lot about the Extremo mind-set : A roomful of noisy people working on bite- sized chunks of code is preferable to an environment that is more conducive to hard thinking and elegant designs that take all the project s requirements into account. In XP, it appears that everyone on the team must conform to this form of organization. There is no flexibility.

Conversely, other processes besides XP do at least offer some form of organizational flexibility, as we discuss in Chapter 3.

 

Another consultant puts it this way:

Pair programming will always be a problem in a society of individualists (particularly of the American strain). Most of us are willing to share (i.e., peer review) but we do not want to show our ˜stuff until it is ready. It is just human nature. Dealing with a mentor is a bit different. Most of us are willing to use a mentor for suggestion and help, but we do not even want our mentor to sit on our shoulder all day long. Let the mentor help others, too. ^[9]

^[7] Dino Fancellu, e-mail to author, January 5, 2003.

^[8] Ron Jeffries, posting to the C2 Wiki page Pair Programming Ergonomics, http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?PairProgrammingErgonomics .

^[9] Gary A. Ham, e-mail to author, March 3, 2003.