Engineering teams that have a strong pairing culture on Key Values

GitHub

Distributed Revision Control and Source Code Management

San Francisco, CA (HQ), Remote Global (65%)
Our pairing culture is closely connected to our flexible work arrangements.

Especially on the tech side where we’re ~80% remote, pairing happens pretty frequently. We don’t enforce pair programming at GitHub and we’re not dogmatic about the practice, but because we’re largely remote, it helps to foster a sense of community and team building. Pairing culture varies quite a bit between teams (which also vary in size but are never larger than ~15), and people schedule their pairing sessions to accommodate each person’s timezone and schedule. Being a remote-first company means that we can hire the best people in the world because location requirements are less rigid. Part of the ethos behind GitHub as a product is that teams can collaborate productively and asynchronously. Our culture is a tangible manifestation of these two things.

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34 Open Positions
Connected

Software Product Development Firm

Toronto, ON
“A Pair is Better Than One.”

Pair programming is one of our primary values—not only an integral part of our engineering process but a core part of our collaborative culture more broadly. To learn more about our commitment to pair programming and the benefits it brings to individuals, teams, and clients, read this article by one of our Engineering Leads. Here, Uzair describes how he went from being skeptical about pure pair-programming to becoming fully hooked.

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6 Open Positions
Gusto

Payroll, Benefits, and HR for Modern Companies

San Francisco, Denver, New York City, or Remote
Pairing is a core part of the day-to-day for engineers at Gusto.

Our engineering culture is built upon camaraderie and great ideas. We have dedicated pairing stations around the office to onboard new teammates and review code, demo days where we share our latest projects, and quarterly hackathons to dive into and ship new features.

Our interviews also involve pair-programming, where candidates partner with the interviewer on a practical programming task, often in our codebase. The interview helps us assess how the candidates might collaborate on our team.

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14 Open Positions
Sparrow

End-to-end employee leave management

San Francisco, CA or Remote (US)
Pairing is a core part of our culture and an investment in everyone’s growth.

We’ve always done regular pair programming on a weekly basis where front and backend engineers work on something together. However, we’ve actually found that upping the frequency of pairing will benefit us even more. In the future, engineers who join Sparrow can expect to pair 2 or 3 days a week – and it won’t always be with the same person. We plan to rotate pairing partners, so you’ll spend a half or full day with someone new each time. This ensures we create an inclusive environment and get to know one another better. It could be that one person starts the feature and the other person finishes it so we can avoid situations where only one person fully understands what’s happening. We believe this makes us more efficient and a stronger, more cohesive team. Ultimately, we view it as an investment in everyone’s growth.

Pairing is so important to us that we screen for it in interviews. We recognize there are times when engineers prefer to have uninterrupted clear working time, so we strive to have a healthy balance. That said, if you're a lone wolf who never wants to pair, this probably isn’t the place for you. On the other hand, if you’ve never paired before but are open to it, that’s not a disqualifier at all, and we’d love to hear from you!

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3 Open Positions
CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform

Distributed across the US, Canada, Ireland, UK, Germany, Japan
Our teams value close collaboration.

The majority of engineering folks work remotely and not from an office, so pair programming is typically virtually (even during non-COVID times). As a distributed company, pair programming helps build and strengthen relationships among teammates. It helps us avoid knowledge silos, distribute information, and serves as a means of quality assurance. We’ve found it’s also a really great tool for onboarding new hires. Almost all teams at CircleCI pair some of the time, but how much varies from team to team depending on personal preferences and timezone distributions.

We also understand you can’t pair effectively through an entire work day. Teams use pragmatic approaches, with a mix of pair programming and solo work time. Some teams also do mobbing sessions. At the end of the day, cowboy coders don’t help us scale, which is why we’re looking for people who are willing to learn from one another and level up via pair programming as needed.

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19 Open Positions
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Engineering teams that have a strong pairing culture

Our pairing culture is closely connected to our flexible work arrangements.

“A Pair is Better Than One.”

Pairing is a core part of the day-to-day for engineers at Gusto.

Pairing is a core part of our culture and an investment in everyone’s growth.

Our teams value close collaboration.

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