I'll jump in here with a small comment about paired programming: it's awesome. Fortunately, my current work place really encourages it. I was kind of iffy about the whole idea at first, but I've changed my mind completely since I started seeing how much better my programming is when you combine two minds. You catch a lot of assumptions & get exposed to a lot of different ways of seeing things. One big bonus, too, is that a lot of different people become familiar with different areas of code. So if something breaks, you have a larger pool of people who can fix it.

The only problems we've run into are that some folks type dvorak & some type qwerty- there are always pairs forming where only 1 person can actually type faster than 1 letter a minute on the keyboard being used. (;