Ask HN: What non-standard practices do your team do that you wish more did?

I do say it depends though, I think that if the skill level is too far apart it becomes more like a knowledge transfer or teaching, which feels way less productive (even if it is productive). I am also not advocating for this full time.

Some people hate it, I would love to hear some arguments against it.

Also, with traditional pair programming (one driver, one navigator) you're allocating two programmers on a single task, meaning that pair will need to generate at minimum the equivalent work of two programmers operating independently. I've never seen that work out to be true.

The only argument for pair programming I've ever subscribed to is that it can be used to more rapidly educate inexperienced programmers. If you compared the relative costs of inexperienced vs experienced programmers that math might pan out. Of course, then you have skilled programmers you're potentially underpaying, which is a problem in and of itself.