The invitation sounds friendly. Shall we pair on this tomorrow morning? You can drive. Something in your stomach drops, because driving means sharing your screen while somebody far more experienced watches you type, mistype, forget a command and search for something you feel you should already know.
Here is something worth hearing early. Experienced engineers look things up constantly. They forget syntax, mistype commands and open the documentation for functions they have used a hundred times. What makes them experienced is not that they skip those steps. It is that they are completely unembarrassed by them.
The person watching you knows this, because they do it too. They are not grading your typing speed. They are usually looking at something much more interesting: how you approach the problem. Where you look first. What you check before you change anything. Whether you say when you are unsure.
So narrate. Say what you are about to try and why. I am going to read the tests first, to see what this was meant to do. Thinking out loud turns the session into a conversation, and it lets your partner help with your reasoning rather than your keystrokes. Silence is what makes pairing feel like an exam.
Say I do not know this one early and plainly. I always forget how this flag works, give me a second to look it up. It sounds like a confession. It is what senior people say all day.
When they suggest something, try it, even if you would have done it differently, and talk about the difference afterwards. And when you spot something they missed, say so. Pairing runs in both directions, and a junior who catches an off by one error is being useful, not presumptuous.
Ask for breaks. Two hours of continuous pairing tires anybody, however senior. Ten minutes away from the screen every hour is normal, and nobody will think less of you for suggesting it.
After a few sessions the fear changes shape. You notice that a week of pairing has taught you more about how good engineers actually work than months of reading their finished code. The messy part, the searching and the false starts, was the lesson all along.
– Asael Shinder
Top comments (1)
"Something in your stomach drops" is the whole post in one line. That drop hits before you've typed a single character, which tells you it isn't about skill. Your subconscious decides how safe you are through a filter called the RAS. Being watched by someone more senior reads as a threat, so your body tenses up, your thinking narrows, and suddenly you blank on a command you've typed a hundred times. The blanking is the alarm going off, not a gap in what you know.
Narrating is a great fix because it gives the filter something to do besides scan for judgment. But pairing reps only teach it that pairing is safe. The same drop will show up in the next design review or salary conversation. So run reps outside work too. Genuine compliment to a stranger. When that is easy, add a bit of conversation. Does not matter how it lands. The action is the win. When one room gets easy, find a harder one.