Hey, I am the author of the article. Happy to hear that it works well for you. I have been personally where you are only in office environment, and fair point, it does and can happen that things work smoothly.
That said, I have seen it more not working than working. I think it depends a lot on the environment and conditions that people are working/operating, for example we are a relatively newly formed team (90% of the team joined within last 10-12 months), and we definitely see the outlined problems more, while we learn how it is to work together.
My partner works for a company that actually does pair programming in the interview process, to ensure all new hires perform satisfactorily using that method of development. All development there is done using pair programming and the general overall sentiment is that it improves productivity over solo development. So it works if everyone you hire works well with it.
While it’s a bit early to make right conclusions, we already have some learnings and outcomes. We do see increase in overall happiness and mood in the team, knowledge is shared more effectively and we started slowly to break silos. Another interesting side-effect seems to be that regardless people collaborate on particular problem or not, disagreements somehow got easier to resolve, as we understand each other better.
Another interesting change is that we need less synch meetings.
So far the biggest challenge is respecting individuals preferences, as the more people collaborate together, the more it becomes implicit expectation, whereas not everyone wants to do it, or some days you want some others not. So making sure that we don’t get pulled to any extreme is very important. Time zone differences is another challenge, sometimes because energy level really differs and its hard to find the harmony working together.
Look at how poorly these articles describe the surveys. One mentions a Pittsburgh recruiting firm - they couldn't even give the firm's name? These surveys are mysterious - nothing even on sample size.
I was thinking to show the journey of the user through questions/answers at the end when there is a final answer, but having growing log during the progress would be better for sure, nice idea!
I agree that there are people who had luck. However in my experience those people are usually quite confident and don't have any problems with that. They know they cheat and are quite happy and relaxed about that, and have no wish to change it.
