I noticed you mentioned before that you are currently a company founder; was your full pair-programming experience at a previous job? Was that what it was like, and were you forced to work with an individual in which that was the dynamic?

My guess would be that full pair-programming wouldn't be uni-directional (you type, I tell you what to type, all day, every day), but I could definitely see that being the worst-case scenario.

Yes at a previous job and all of us were in one location so it was more common to sit in the same cubicle, the one person typer probably arose from that. I was not forced to do it, I imagine if I would have complained accommodations would have been made but I'm fully capable of working like that so I stuck it out. There were days where I was not the primary person typing and I would always try to steer the work towards larger sets of changes that could be completed by one person in a predictable amount of time, once found I would suggest they work on that while I step away and work on something else. It might be that the programming I have been involved with is so banal that I have not encountered a problem that could not be described in advance well enough to allow all engineers to work on a separate piece of the application. I also found that pairing sometimes led to excessive non work related conversation.

I would say your last statement is correct, each team needs to find working dynamics that make all members successful. I finished the project on that team and accepted a contract position in another city for a larger client.

We have a new project though, a graph backed transaction management platform, that will require more collaboration than our usual crud app but we will still not have a policy that involves "sit down and write the code together."