Thanks. I had to work hard to keep the anger out of it, I allowed a little bitterness to come through but I think I managed to refrain from ranting. For me that’s serious progress.

But the pair programming, a mere three hours of it, was one of the worst experiences of my life. Being buried alive and feeling the air go stale can’t be a lot worse. For some reason the memory remained vivid year after year, a daily preoccupation that set my heart pounding. I’ve been in two auto accidents where I missed death or quadruplegia by a centimeter of luck, and I go for years at a time without thinking about them at all, much less the daily horrors of remembering that afternoon.

Talking to another Medium writer about her own experiences on Wall Street I realized that I have PTSD, which I thought one had to be in a war to acquire. I’m in counseling now trying to put it behind me. My partner in pairing was a condescending Indian corporate buttkisser half my age and a quarter my experience, if that, who treated me as an entry level developer and whom I intensely disliked already. Sitting literally hip to hip.

Any recommendations on where to publish that? I will make another pass and clean up the awkward areas.

If I have one passionate advocacy in software it’s restoring awareness of flow and what a difference it makes. I’ve talked to younger developers who have never known how we worked before and it’s shocking to me what they have come to expect; they talk about happy teams doing complete bullshit like TDD and pair programming. The fanatic craziness around testing is so evidently wrong .. I had one guy advocating early returns who was telling me that comments are indicative of bad code.

The industry has gone nuts.