Comments by "Dean Schulze" (@deanschulze3129) on "Why Pull Requests Are A BAD IDEA" video.

The recruiter for one company that had hired Pivotal to setup their software development team called me. She mentioned the mandatory pair programming and mandatory hours and said that she couldn't find anyone who wanted to work under that regime. I told her that I would have to pass on it too.
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@13b78rug5h - When you say "I would never think of doing anything else" you give yourself away as closed minded.
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Dave Farley wants mandatory pair programming to replace pull requests. There are a couple of immediate problems with this. Some teams require that two (or more) developers approve a PR. What would Dave do in this case? Triple programming? Some teams require that an architect approve all PRs. In order to do what Dave wants you would have to have an architect on each pair. Your team would be half developers and half architects. The unspoken fact in Dave's approach is that you can't require multiple approvals of code and you can't require that an architect approve code changes.
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Farley starts out by saying that feature branches are bad. Everyone should commit to the same branch (the trunk). I can see some benefit to that. It may reduce merge conflicts. But then he goes from talking about the problems with pull requests to advocating pair programming. If pair programming is as beneficial as he claims it would be widely used. That goes for the other fads that consultants push, like TDD. Uncle Bob Martin used to go around saying the TDD would become the minimum standard for professional conduct in software engineering. He likened it to surgery with and without anesthetic. Maybe you've notice that uncle Bob hasn't been as vocal about TDD defining the boundary between professionals and amateurs. That change happened when I called him out on one online forum and asked him point blank if he considered Linus Torvalds and Peter Norvig to be amateurs because they didn't practice TDD. The dirty, unspoken secret of pair programming is that it comes with mandatory hours. There's a company that does real estate analytics that I really wanted to work for because I love real estate. Their recruiter called me and told me, with resignation, that they had hired Pivotal to setup their software development process and Pivotal had mandated PP with mandatory hours of 10 - 6. She said that she had not been able to hire any developers who wanted to work under that regime. I told her that I wouldn't be a good fit for that regime either. Now maybe Pivotal was being crazy like a fox. They dictated a regime that no one wanted to work under, so this company would be left with no other choice but to outsource their software development. Maybe to a company like Pivotal. Maybe there are problems with PRs, but there are much bigger problems with PP. And PP advocates don't want to discuss them publicly.
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@Macknull Do you have any data to back up your claims that the results for studies done on students are also true for senior devs?
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@kasperstergaard1592 OK, but trunk-based development doesn't mean pair programming. One way of doing development is that everyone commits to trunk and branches are for releases.
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