Seibel: I’m surprised you think the master-programmer model is such a dumb idea. In your “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” essay you make the point that programming is a skill that, like many skills, probably takes about a decade to really master. And lots of crafts had
master/journeymen/apprentice kind of hierarchies. So maybe nobody wants to be the apprentice, but maybe it isn’t crazy to say that somebody who’s been through that decade-long learning experience should be doing different work than someone who’s fresh out of school.

Norvig: I think the best part of the apprentice approach is that you get to watch the master, and I would like to see more of that. So I guess that’s another use of pair programming. I can see that it’d be really good, if you were inexperienced, to watch somebody who’s much more experienced.
Particularly for the types of things that aren’t taught as much, like debugging skills. Anybody can learn algorithms and so on, but they don’t really teach debugging and watching someone, and saying, “Wow, I never thought of doing that,” that’s really useful.

But I think part of the reasons why you had master and apprentice is because the materials were rarer. When you were doing goldsmithing, there’s only so much gold. Or when the surgeon’s operating, there’s only one heart, and so you want the best person on that and you want the other guys just helping. With coding, it’s not like that. You’ve got plenty of terminals. You’ve got plenty of keyboards. You don’t have to ration it.

Coders at Work – Page 295 – Peter Norvig