I sure am! Introversion doesn't mean you don't like interacting with other people, rather it's that such interaction is draining, and you need to be alone to "recharge" (whereas extroverts "recharge" by talking to others). Even the exhaustion of interacting with people is more of a scale than a binary thing -- I personally find one-on-one interactions much easier than groups.
Coding is NOT a real-time procedural performance activity, and thus can not be compared to aviation or surgery. Code reviews, collaboration on architectural decisions, and QA catch mistakes as early as necessary.
All these professions require a mix of procedural and declarative skill. Pilots and surgeons aren't professional athletes, they rely on enormous amounts of declarative knowledge.
The easiest time to catch a mistake is when it's made, which is as true of surgery or flight as of software development.
That's why I rely on type systems, tests and whenever I can, someone next to me asking "why?".
Read again: Coding is NOT a real time performance activity, thus can not be compared with aviation and surgery in that way. Pairing is a requirement to do aviation and surgery reliably and accurately, but is completely optional for coding well, and arguably reduces quality of code in many cases.
Pairing destroys deep focus. It's an impediment for hardcore coders. Maybe it appeals to extroverts with short attention spans who prefer to socialize rather than do their jobs.
For many of us, perhaps most of us, being forced into Pair Programming completely destroys the enjoyment and fun of programming. For people like me it's the difference between loving my job, or hating every second of it and not wanting to get up for work in the morning.
Frequent peer review and collaboration on important architectural decisions is sufficient. Sitting down and actually writing code together is unnecessary torture.
Imagine some legendary coder like Linus Torvalds or John Carmack writing the Linux Kernel or the Quake engine side by side with another dude at their keyboard all day every day. It's a fucking absurd and infantile concept.
