After 5 months of being a mob programmer, I have to say that I've never enjoyed coding as much as I do now.
I find that I have a "scrum master" brain and a "programmer" brain that dance around each other in my head during my work days. Sometimes I wonder whether my mob has discussed a kanban card in enough detail to uncover as many of the knowable unknowns as we can; sometimes I wonder where the curly braces go when writing an arrow function in Angular. In either case, as a mob programmer, I get to lean on my fellow mobbers for guidance and input.
I appreciate working somewhere where the "scrum master" brain is still appreciated, even though my job title is Associate Software Developer. The sorts of questions that came to my mind when planning a sprint still come to my mind when my mob is looking at a kanban board and slicing our work into consumable chunks. The best part is now I get to help discover the answers to these questions, instead of just posing the questions as an outsider.
One thing I'm coming to realize is that mob programming can be a great equalizer. It lowers the barrier of entry for new programmers, and can allow new-comers to contribute technically sooner than if they were left to their own devices. One of my favorite experiences has been inviting our UX designing into the mob with us, working together in real-time to make decisions on the look and feel of our website. In my humble opinion, mob programming what the first Extreme Programmers were day-dreaming about work being like. I hope that in the near future, mob programming can also allow more people to find a place for themselves in the tech industry.
Our industry still has a problem with blocking out folks who could be great programmers from being able to be programmers. I hold a view that my peers may disagree with - I don't think being a programmer has to be as difficult as we like to think it should be. Programming is about problem solving with others using various tools and technologies; it's not about being the smartest person in the room. Especially in this world where we can remotely work from the comfort of our own homes, we should be using mob programming to widen the net of who will be in the next generation of programmers. The world is made up of very many different types of people; our industry should be made up of very many different types of programmers.
For now, I will enjoy my renewed ardor for programming and collaborative work.