Comments by "Andrea Laforgia" (@andrealaforgia) on "Mob Programming Surprised Me" video.

>Stupid short cuts, no organizing. That has nothing to do with mob programming :)
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New hires are complete strangers joining our teams all the time. We must have a process in place that allows them to become productive as soon as possible. Mob programming is great at making people feel welcome and productive as of day 1.
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No, it's working together, it's communicating, it's collaborating. A meeting can be working together, but working together is not necessarily a meeting. A meeting is communicating, but communicating is not necessarily a meeting. A meeting can be collaboration but collaboration is not necessarily a meeting.
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The ability to communicate is a prerequisite for any sort of collaboration, even asynchronous. Mob programming is nothing different than working together. The team must establish a relaxed and psychologically safe atmosphere where everybody is free to think out loud and share.
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>The question that everyone in business typically asks, and that mobbers tend to deprecate, is whether it’s enough better to justify the obviously high investment, along with the abandonment of just about all work done in parallel. Business folks often wonder that indeed. I guess these problems arise when two very different areas intersect: technical practices and people management. My answer to that is that it would be easier to understand if "everyone in business" stopped thinking of humans as machines. Making humans work in isolation produces a worse result than having them work as a group. We've known that since the dawn of time. Humans are social animals who achieve exceptional results by collaborating (whether it's chasing a mammoth or coding a new feature). Besides, there is no point in creating teams only to make team members work in silos. What's the point of making me build a spaghetti and marshmallow tower with my colleagues if then you want me to play in my little corner, with my headset on? In no other field, we'll be able to find teams that don't collaborate synchronously to solve a current problem (football teams, military platoons, surgical equipes). The business folks should therefore stop equating mobbing/pairing with typing. Working together means thinking more clearly, sharing knowledge, achieving consensus, creating better quality, getting higher job satisfaction, avoiding wasteful activities of synchronization and rework (which often happens with post-development code reviews) and ultimately saving time.
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Every complex collaborative work activity requires a certain level of communication skills. It's just part of the job. If people sit quietly and do not contribute or even pay attention, that's a problem. It's deeper than just what happens in mob sessions. It's a professional ethics problem. As part of the hiring process, it is crucial to explore the communication ability of a candidate and their attitude towards teamwork. I do think that there is an upper limit to the number of people who can work in a mob and, based on my experience, that's 4 or 5. Pair programming is good but only when pairs regularly rotate. Otherwise the problem is that pairs are going to cristallize, with people who either always want to work together or never want to work together.
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I can tell you that some coding bootcamps (I've been a mentor in one of them) use pairing and mobbing regularly, rotating the bootcampers. It works really well.
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If it's too intense, then you can inspect whether you are working at a sustainable pace. There are ways to perform mobbing effectively (frequent breaks/rotations, hard "let's call it a day" deadline, etc...)
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Pairing/mobbing is not typing. It's thinking about problems together.
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A single dominating voice is a problem for a team anyway. Something really orthogonal to mob programming. That dominance can manifest asynchronously as well, by silencing others’ contributions in many forms. How you avoid inadvertent, good-faith dominance is by rotating drivers and navigators and having regular sessions to discuss what can be improved. All teams are average. If people want to be the alpha male, fire them; if they are sorry they came across as such, work together to fix that. I’ve been a team lead many times in my career and one of my principles was exactly what you mention: trying to spot the weaker team member, and ensure they were included more and got properly engaged. I remember a retrospective where the only female member of my team bravely complained that she struggled intervening in discussions due to her psychology and the "alpha males" around her prevaricating. My job was to make sure that wouldn’t happen anymore. Companies must change the way they manage people: rewarding individual progress makes sense when individual contribution is required. That's not the case of software engineering. Companies must find different ways.
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@stevecallaghan7523 I'm not sure what a "typical process" is. I've always worked in places where it was my team's responsibility to delivery something, not the individuals in it.
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@stevecallaghan7523 >simply firing people for being an Alpha Male doesn't fly here in the UK I wrote that and I work in the UK. It's not "simply firing people for being an alpha male". I wrote "people who WANT to be the alpha male", which means people who disregard others, want to dominate, silence other people's opinions, do not value other people's contributions, etc. I'm sure that all these behaviours violate a good number of values in every UK company, no matter the field and, over time, manifest in nasty ways that managers are able to spot. Managers should be able to take corrective actions. UK companies have "Improvement required" evaluations which have a final point.
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A clueless team does not achieve any results with any way of working.
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@michaelrstover I don't throw out anyone. I try to make processes inclusive for everyone. Being capable is not enough, though. You must also be able to collaborate. Collaboration is a fundamental requirement in software engineering.
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Wow... where do you work, in a rat cage? :D Mob programming works in environments that embrace mob programming :)
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@Thorax232 Jesus Christ... the way you guys trivialize valuable practices is incredible: "3 people chirping in my ear". It must be such a pleasure working with you.
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>to be able to think through the problem steadily and come up with an accurate solution, especially for more complicated problems, and I don't think its possible to do this deep thinking whilst in a mob. Yes, it is possible, but it's a skill that needs to be learned and perfected. Problems must be solved collectively, not alone. The solution is always better when multiple brains share ideas/approaches. You can still spend some time in isolation, if you need, but check back with the team frequently. The risk with thinking alone for too long is that we don't find flaws in our reasoning early, and may go off a tangent.
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Mob programming has been my favorite way of working for quite a long time now. Whenever I used it, we ended up being way more productive than working independently, with the nice side effect of sharing knowledge across the team, increasing confidence in answering questions about the system, increasing job satisfaction, reducing burnout (deadline was 5pm — no work after that time). I remember joining a team where 4 out of 5 people were new. There was only 1 person who'd been in the company for a few years, who knew the system well and could answer questions. He ended up spending most of his day assisting others. I proposed moving to a mob programming model. It started as an experiment but it became our standard way of working. For me, the crucial moment was when, jokingly, someone said, well "C. is the expert in our team!", to which C. smiled and replied "not anymore!!". Everybody had become an expert. I think there is an upper limit, though, and that's 4-5 people (which, to me, should be the size of a team). I'm aware, however, of a few contexts where large mobs worked really well. Austin Chadwick and Chirs Lucian (Mob Mentality Show, here on YouTube and LinkedIn) interviewed an engineer from Tesla some time ago, if you are interested.
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