Pair programming is a form of communication, it's a way for people to teach each other. Some people really work well with this learning style, and if you're one of those people, I would absolutely find ways to do it regularly.

When you become a senior dev, you should be taking time to help juniors build their skills. You will need to involve them in architectural discussions, pair programming for complex PRs, etc. So these are skills you need to have, IMO.

One technique I've seen work well is, build a PR for a specific feature, then ask someone if you can do a quick "pair programming" / demo session where you outline the architecture, show the code, maybe debug and step through some stuff. Like a highly developer-oriented demo, as a preliminary step for the other dev hitting Approve on your PR.

This has a lot of benefits:

- It can morph into pair programming

- A lot of questions that are raised in a good PR will be answered synchronously

- The PR feedback you get will be much, much better--in fact, it'll be the kind of feedback that you turn you into a mid-level and eventually senior dev.

I as a senior definitely learned some things from our juniors, too. I still remember some keyboard shortcuts, I learned in these sessions, like ALT+SHIFT+UP / DOWN to increase/decrease the marked text or with Eclipse Keymap ALT+Y to mark the next occurrence for multi-cursor tasks.