I remember the fad. I was around for the Extreme Programming era. But, I've never worked anywhere that pair programming was the norm, nor have I known any developers that wanted to pair program, in the general case.

My personal experience is, of course, not representative of an entire industry, but I just have a hard time imagining it being a common thing. I like working with other people and helping juniors sort out their problems, but I'd quit my job if I had to take turns writing code while someone else watched and just sitting and watching someone else writing code. Both of those things seem horrible, to me.

I love pairing. It always results it better outcomes than not pairing and I've been saddened by the slow decay of the term to now refer to like "talk to me a bit until I'm unstuck" instead of "both work together and get it done"

I happened to "pair program" for the first time in years today! My coworker asked me to come over and help him with a problem.

'course we only did it for like 5 min to get him over the hump.

I think that's the only use case. It sucks having someone hover over you otherwise.

This sounds like ‘pair debugging’ which I’ve found to work pretty well. ‘Pair development’ isn’t something I’ve ever really found helpful, though.

I worked at Pivotal Labs, it was an amazing experience to be in an environment where everyone was onboard with a very well defined methodology. Certainly not for everyone, but everyone who was there had the same mentality. A bit like you'd expect from a cult or the military.

I consulted on an internal project where the leads literally made one dev control the keyboard and another dev control the mouse! It was the most ridiculous thing I ever saw. I fought for those poor kids, the leads were eventually fired or quit.