Engineering teams that have a strong pairing culture

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.