Dahlia Bock

ThoughtWorks University: Effective use of pairing as a coaching tool

Part of the current format of ThoughtWorks University (TWU, the graduate training program at ThoughtWorks) is to place grads on a project to get their hands dirty and experience what it would be like to be on TW project with a real client. There have been debates about whether or not a project run at TWU is indicative of what a real TW project would be, one of the reasons being the ratio of experienced to inexperienced team members is really low, but we shall put those arguments aside for now.

As a trainer, one of my responsibilities is to pair with the grads on my team as I would've done on any other project. However, things are not as straightforward as just pairing because it involves other sub-responsibilities as well, e.g. assessing their technical skill levels, figuring out their problem solving techniques, understanding how best they learn and adjusting my coaching responses to them accordingly. Of the two terms of TWU that I worked with, we had an average of 5 grad developers to a trainer. Ideally, I would like to have at least 3-4 days of pairing time per grad, broken into 2-day slots where the former would be a chance for me to assess where they are at and how to form a customized coaching plan for them and the latter for them to have a chance for them to work on the feedback they received from the first pairing session (if any) or get more out of pairing with someone with more experience since that really is one of the main goals in the first place.

At 4 days per grad and 5 grads per trainer, that works out to be 20 days in total. With only 6 weeks per term, that doesn't allow room for edge cases or other work that will take away time from pairing (surprisingly enough, there are lots of it).

What I think would be preferable is to have a 3-1 grad/trainer ratio and a smaller number of grads per group. I don't think piling on more trainers to the mix will improve the situation as more people means more overhead. I would like to hear other TWU trainers' experiences related to this (apologies for this being very TW-specific) because circumstance seemed to have dictated that my 2 terms were (somewhat abnormally) large ones and I wished that things had been different.