Now navigate to the FOO service

FOO is the background event scheduler, it's connected to BAR via RPC

Ok don't worry about what that is for now, just have a look at the service logs

So it's a daemon that running on port 5000

You'll have to tail the logs in /var/foo/logs

So type T. A. I. L, and then dash f

No, the hyphen character, not literally dash

And so on and so forth. It's not that a person more senior than you can't drive, but I have found a lot of time the implicit knowledge of so many systems, and topics and accreted domain knowledge can really be a productivity drain. The best pairing usually comes from equally matched individuals.

A software engineer at a tech company that doesn't know about commandline flags? That doesn't seem very realistic.

Anyway, this person will learn that dash means - , and not make that mistake again. It's a one-time mistake. So I think the pairing helps even in this case.

> A software engineer at a tech company that doesn't know about commandline flags? That doesn't seem very realistic.

Why not? 95% of most peoples work can be done in an IDE/text editor, and that last 5% is probably very exploratory anyway. I work in games, and gameplay programmers work almost exclusively out of IDEs with GUIs for source control and most other dev tools etc.

> Anyway, this person will learn that dash means -, and not make that mistake again. It's a one-time mistake.

Disagree that it's a one time mistake. On any given day/task there might be 5/10/15 of these. dash, ctrl + r, tab complete, !!, different shells, shebangs, flaky backend services, etc etc. If you want to teach someone how you work then yes this might be appropriate.

> So I think the pairing helps even in this case.

That said, I agree :) It depends though, is your goal to bring two programmers up to speed or is it to crunch through tasks right now? Because pairing helps with one of those goals but not the other

Okay, solution:

teach the person to use a computer first

Have you ever paired with a junior before? This is definitely the kind of thing you would encounter with a fresh grad/intern.

Sounds good -- I know that you're a great teacher. You'll still have those features done by tomorrow, right?

I read your parent as "that guy should not be anywhere near programming, he needs to learn how to use a computer first".

Okay I might exeggerate a bit but if someone literally writes 'dash' at that point, don't pair on something that has a deadline like that.

Do take him aside and let him know he gotta brush up on the damn basics and that you are there for him through it but you're gonna finish that feature with a deadline first while he takes a stab at that easy bug over there.

Exactly. The easy fix is not to have the mentee drive.

Tell the PM that we need to go slower to get faster.