It is the hype that pair programming or programming in a team will make the team 1+1>2 better

Among the pair programming proponents, I haven't read or listen nowhere that pair programming is a practice to speed up the development. Its purpose is completely different: its purpose is to obtain high quality pieces of code.

We all specialize in one part of the projects, there are no code reviews

Shame on your team. Code reviews are essential, even for highly qualified teams. I know, I know, you don't believe that doing pair programming could help to obtain better software. But probably it has some relation with the fact of not doing code reviews...

Code review is something that has to be mastered too. Not every code review is valuable by itself, because the first times, or even the first months, people tend to focus their attention to minor issues, while disregarding very important aspects of the software. As the team evolves, and skilled and experienced developers enter into the team, the code reviews dynamics change very drastically, and then, when the critical view becomes predominant, code review features its maximum value, but also pair programming for the same reason.

You never become the alpha developer. You will end up as a beta developer that can be easily replaced by your company.

On the contrary, I'm sort of an "alpha developer" in my current company, and as I previously said, pair programming isn't something I do every day, but it's a valuable practice in many situations. In addition to that: as many people has told in this discussion, pair programming has to be done with relatively balanced pairs, not with people that have a very big gap between their skill levels.

:mother_of_god:

I don't think pair programming is something to do all the time, but doing that sometimes is a very good practice.

• It isn't true that very good programmers are able to learn everything by themselves at a good pace. They are human as everyone else, they are fallible, and they are not alone: there are other good programmers that probably know different things... So, yes, eventually, a good programmer will learn everything that needs to do his/her work, but collaborating with other peers will accelerate the learning pace.
• Even bad programmers can learn something (and "bad" is a relative term).
• I think that this post is a rant because you think that you're far better than your coworkers... maybe it's even true, but that's not a very good reason to think that good programmers should learn in a lonely way.