[gregkerzhner]

The part of my brain which thinks deeply and produces elegant solutions simply shuts down when I constantly have to explain my thought process to someone else. I actually have the same problem in pair programming interviews - my brain tends to freeze up and comes up with strange, hacky workarounds at best.

Later, when I’m alone and can focus the proper answer usually comes to me. I know there are others like me who produce their best work when they can focus, alone.

If pairing works for you, then that’s great, but it needs to be consensual and optional.

The problem with pairing is that it tends to be championed and enforced by more social workers (especially managers), and forced on the less social ones, who are often not in a position to refuse.

[RHSeeger]

> If pairing works for you, then that’s great, but it needs to be consensual and optional.

This is the key in my mind. Pair programming doesn't work for me, based on past experience. Pair design works great, and rubber ducking into a slack channel (that people expect that kind of thing to be in); those are things I find highly useful. But when it comes time to actually write code, I tend to work best alone.

I think part of the reason for this is that I tend to work through designs and possible implementations in my head, but by writing code. Then I'll discuss those designs to come up with some possible issues (pros/cons/etc). Then I'll work on implementing what seems likely to be the best choice (which is may not be once coding starts). By the time I get to coding, most of the impact of someone else being involved is just going to be catching typos. Or possibly code written in a hard to maintain way... but code reviews will catch that just as well (probably more so, because the person reviewing it _wasn't_ there when it was written).

[ParetoOptimal]

> Later, when I’m alone and can focus the proper answer usually comes to me. I know there are others like me who produce their best work when they can focus, alone.

Yeah, I've taken "thinking breaks" during pair sessions for this reason.