Interesting Times

We are continuing to work with a second company in order to try to get our product finished more quickly. Each week we seem to be adding another pair of programmers to the team, we are up to 4 pairs now, 2 of which have nobody from our company on them.

I am feeling really bad for the one developer from our company since he is being asked to continue work on our prototype (which is only being used to show to companies to get interest in the new product).

This week I started pairing with a guy new to our project. I thought he was doing ok and then at the end of the day he said he had to go to class. I asked him what class he was taking...I found out that he was going to learn Java. We are writing our application in Java! Even more amazing, we were given another new guy to partner with someone else, and he doesn't know Java either!

I was absolutely amazed that we were given partners that don't know the language that we are working in. Now, to the guys credit, he does know other languages, and to a certain extent it is pretty true that if you know how to program, the language is just syntax and you can pick it up. But, I have also learned that there are a lot of efficiencies that you gain from a deeper understanding of a language than just the syntax.

I have obviously been doing a lot of the driving (that is what it is called when you are the one typing) and it is getting kind of tiring. I gave him the keyboard for a while this afternoon to do some fixing of some compilation issues and he did that well enough, but not sure how well he'd do to write something new from scratch.

I will keep everyone posted on how it goes with this guy and the other one. I am curious to see what other people in my company think about working with them. At least it might reduce some arguments about the architecture of our system!