Engineering teams that have a strong pairing culture

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.

Pairing encourages knowledge sharing and new ideas.

Many of us have different technical skillsets, so pairing helps us avoid silos and learn from one another. When a dev encounters an issue during installfest, or a bug during QA, it’s common for us to reach out to each other on Slack to request to share screens and walk through the problem together. We also regularly pair during planning phases or to design solutions together when it comes to technologies that need both backend and frontend feedback.

As we start to plan the Android build of the CHANI app and create a system to support junior engineers, we see programming and test-driven development as an important part of our engineering culture. While we understand the need for heads-down time, if you prefer to be a lone wolf coder 100% of the time, it’s probably not the best fit. In fact, pairing is so important to us that we’ve made it a large part of our interviewing process. The technical interview focuses on pair programming because we want to work with folks who are able to communicate effectively while live coding, pairing, and mentoring.

Pairing is a core part of our culture and how we learn from one another.

As a distributed company, pair programming is a great way to help us build and strengthen relationships. While pairing happens on an ad hoc basis, it’s not unusual for people to pair multiple times a week or even daily over video conferencing. We also run “mobbing” sessions for big projects, where a group works on the same task in the same conferencing space, and use Slack huddles to jump into problem-solving sessions. As one of our engineers, Spencer says, “I always learn something new every time I pair with someone.” In addition to helping us avoid knowledge silos, pairing allows us to distribute information and acts as a means of quality assurance. It’s not a hard requirement to pair – but we love it as one tool in our belt.

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.