This post on pairing pretty much matches my experience after seven years of doing it at Pivotal Labs: https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2022-12-07-what-i-learned-from-pairing/

Definitely appreciate that it uses the same framing that I do of “default” pairing.

But I do think the style of pairing that I enjoyed the most out of all the different kinds of pairing I did was “poloing”. Soloing and pairing are just the end points along a long axis of working, and poloing allowed us to use the appropriate level of collaboration for what we were working on. We’d often solo and get quick questions and answered when needed, and elevate into full-on pairing when we needed that level of feedback. When remote, it also allowed for the sort of idle bullshitting chatter with coworkers that I missed out on from working in person.

@alpha interesting read. When I was at thoughtworks we paired full time, and though I personally didn't find drawbacks around scheduling and exhaustion, I can definitely see why some people will experience that. With poloing, did a task just get paused while you jumped into a full pairing session with someone else? And in your teams was it seen as something a "junior" would ask of a "senior" if they were stuck?

@pugloaf I only ever got to experience it on a project where I polo-ed with another developer at my skill level, but when we were soloing, we’d usually ask for the other’s attention once they had a good opportunity for context-switching, with a level-set for what we wanted to get feedback on. But yeah, when we’d move into full-on pairing, whatever the other person was doing would get put down during that time.

I think ideally, I’d want to polo similarly to how I paired at Labs - swap out with a new person each day. (To be clear, even when we were soloing in a polo-ing pair, we were still on Zoom with each other for much of the day, usually muted while soloing.)