Couldn't agree more. I worked 2 years 100% pairing, it's just too much. I also have some mildly introspective personality and the extra overhead of communicating every single word typed not only interferes with my deep thinking, but would make me feel exhausted by 4pm, instead of my normal capacity to work long hours for quite a few days before starting to realise I needed to rest.
As soon as read "hacking" being used as a synonym for coding/development, I started to get angry. I still read it just in case I was wrong, just to end up being right, and angry.
Saw it happening a few times in my 12 year of industry. I suppose it's specifically common in companies that use social media (and other media) presence as a recruitment boosting tool.
Twice the "leader" of the "Totally Amazing Success" left the company to "be totally amazing" somewhere else. In both cases the team was made mostly of very young engineers, the level of amazingness was strongly overestimated. It was also declared very early, before the "novelty" of the "new thing" faded, and also before the downsides appeared while maintaining the product.
Answering to a "male problem" (e.g. men pursuing less education) by stating it's actually another example of bias agains women ("that's because women need more education to get the same job") is not really a constructive position, is it?
As a slightly above average dev in London (and I mean it), I feel that for many big companies the interview process always achieve on thing: to avoid hiring anyone who could really transform it for the better.
To be fair, I believe a big part of this kind of reaction often comes from being pushed trendy "easy fix for something important" from HR or top management quite frequently.
"The new Find My app combines Find My iPhone and Find My Friends into a single, easy-to-use app on Mac, iPad and iPhone. Find My can help users locate a missing Mac even if it’s offline and sleeping by sending out Bluetooth signals that can be detected by Apple devices in use nearby, and then relaying the detected location of the Mac to iCloud so a user can can locate it in the Find My app."
I'm curious about what kind of T&C will need to be accepted for this to work.
Whenever I go to the pub and meet old timers still working there keep telling me funny stories about how you swear loudly every time you open a code file I've touched.
This helped me in quite a few interviews, and I'm only 39yo. Thanks for putting it in a clear, logic and fun way. My brain had guessed the basic mechanism, but hadn't formulated it in words yet.
For that, I humbly concede you the title of my "BS Master".
"A 10x engineer is usually levitating, and farting out 1's and 0's as they whiteboard a proof that P=NP. They stopped sleeping before they were born. They are usually typing on two keyboards simultaneously."