Especially to those on a visa, the only one forcing you to remain in the USA / Bay Area / x company is yourself. To put it bluntly, no one is entitled to a job, and this applies to every person. In this scenario, it's not like strangers are being pulled off the streets by Pivotal to pair program.
Suppose an employer asks a loved one to have sex with them or they lose their job. I mean, no one is putting a gun to your loved one's head to have sex with their employer, but something is clearly very wrong at this level right? Suppose they have an expensive debilitating medical condition that can really only be treated with good insurance (I have seen this firsthand where a medication can cost hundreds a month even with insurance (not great insurance but I was an intern, it was all I could afford)). Suppose they tried searching for a job with comparable insurance for years but always come up empty. Now when it's between whether or not you will go homeless with a debilitating medical condition or basically being raped, what would you choose? Frankly, I would rather be raped. I have been in the hospital with great insurance as well, when my condition was at its worst, and even morphine and norco did nothing to make the pain go away; I can only imagine how much worse it would have been on the streets with that kind of unending pain; I can only imagine never being able to find a job like that ever again because I will always be in unending pain and never be able to interview well. Fortunately, I got really really lucky in that I am an engineer who is an American citizen that can find jobs easily that dont require me to physically be there but, most people are not in my position. Back to the point, if someone is more willing to be raped than to not be raped out of fear of the consequences, that's pretty damned close to forced right?
But if I worked for Company X and then one day Thou Shalt Pair Or Else, then yeah, it would feel shitty. Labs developers pair with client developers on engagements and sometimes it feels like they've been dropped from a very great height.
Most of the time it works out fine: people are people and we work in the same industry and share many of the same experiences and passions. Sometimes it just doesn't work for everyone, which is also fine.
But insofar as anyone from Pivotal is explicitly or implicitly saying "or else!", I think they are making a mistake and hope they get feedback about it.
And as I noted above, pairing isn't mandated. Teams are free to adopt any process they please, but most folks at Pivotal like the defaults and we tend to gravitate to them.
Pairing was optional, but the team chose to do it, so everyone on the team had to do it.
It wasn't "forced" because I "always had the option to quit the job".
It was hell.
That... sounds like forced to me?