The "mob programming" was the thing that made it hard to take seriously. All the downsides of meetings (bikeshedding, grandstanding, high (time x money) consumption) without time and space to think.
I currently work with what https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9413117 calls "implied pair programming": code reviews before commit. But the rapid build and rapid deploy is so incredibly far from what's achievable here (C++/WinCE land). A quick build takes about 15 minutes. A full all-target-platforms build takes about 3 hours. It's then merged with releases from other teams and handed to QA. Customers are using releases up to three years old.
This is the first I've heard of "extreme programming". Coupled with "dialing it up to 11" it all sounds like pseudo-masochistic nonsense to me, but apparently it's very real.
