But I have recently come to realize there is one task for which typing fast is very important. That task is real-time text chat.
Among my friends in our chat server, and among co-workers on Slack, some people are much more chatty than others. They write more messages. They write longer messages. They have more involved conversations. They have the greatest amount of participation.
Others do not chat as much. I’m sure they have their own reasons, and that’s fine. It’s not right or wrong to participate more or less.
But I realized one day there was a very strong correlation. The people who participate the most are all people who are sitting at computers with keyboards (mostly mechanical ones) and are very proficient at typing. They can all type at least as fast as they can think.
People who use their phones more often, or are slower typists, can’t keep up in a text conversation. If they try to write a long complex thought the conversation will pass them by. They can only get out a shorter sentence in time, and that really puts a damper on their communication. It’s like someone with a quiet voice trying to get a word in a very loud conversation.
This really clicked for me recently when a co-worker admitted to being a very slow hunt and peck typist. They are an excellent engineer, so it’s not a problem there. However, this person is also the person who loves to do Slack huddles all the time. It all made sense. I was absolutely overwhelming this person in text chat with an entire paragraph of ideas before they could peck out a sentence. Of course a huddle is easier for them.
I would like to make a suggestion to slow typists out there who have to use real time text chat. Either learn to type fast and/or start using speech to text features.
I don't touch type, but I do type quickly and I never spend any processing cycles looking for a key, at least on a keyboard with a layout I'm used to.
Like I don't care where people put their fingers, or even if they use them all, but for me its not touch typing if you need to use your eyes.
It depends on what I'm typing. Code? Very rarely, unless I'm using a keyboard that I'm not familiar with. Letters or other prose? About 25% of the time.
But to the deeper point, thank you for clearing this up for me. We are indeed using different definitions. To me, "touch typing" is a very specific method of typing. It's not just the ability to type without looking at the keyboard.
Now that I know there are different definitions, I can be more careful to make sure that I'm using the same definition as others.
I was quite proud of the fact that i could easily out-type my 1200 baud modem. Tech improved and so did my typing.
Late-night C64 BBS's when the sysop jumped in and started talking to you in real-time was the biggest pressure cooker to learn to type, to learn to type fast, and to watch the screen while you type.
The came IRC, and well; in busy channels it was tricky. Today Slack feels slow with all the animated crap.
And yep, I'm a prolific text chatter amongst similarly fast-typing friends and colleagues. It's still my preferred mode of communication. When all parties can keep up it's a really enjoyable medium.
I totally noticed that the most active persons in a conversation are those who type the fastest, and conversely. Seems totally logical.
People always like to say "thinking, not typing, is the bottleneck". This is a totally wrong way to think about it, because for the most part you don't think while you type. You think, then you type. They happen at different times! The more time you spend typing, the longer it is before you can start thinking again.
I think that isn’t true if you’re a good enough typist. Once typing is automated enough, you can (somewhat) multitask.
It is similar to driving a car. If you just learned driving, you can’t do anything else while driving, but if you gain experience, you learn to detect when the road needs you full attention and when it doesn’t, and can talk or think about other things while driving.
I think being able to think of what to write next while typing may be even more important for a fluent conversation than typing faster. It will be difficult to test whether that’s true, though, because automating the act of typing also makes you type faster.
As an analogy, when you're having an in-person conversation, how often do you pause and think before responding, versus forming your thought and speaking it in real-time? There's definitely times to stop and think for a moment before replying, but there's also times where I'm speaking my thoughts as it's formed.
Likewise, if you're comfortable and quick and "at home" with typing, then I'd argue there's no reason you can't type as you're forming your thought just like you speak as you're forming your thought.
(Admittedly I'm typing this on my phone, so not at the speed of my thoughts right now, but I know for sure I've done it over Slack with my coworkers and group chats on Telegram, especially when shooting short quick questions and answers back and forth)
Knowing your tools and underlying tech is also a must and the better you know it the better your intuition will be.
That's not my experience at all. Typing happens without conscious effort, and I'm certainly thinking about what I'm doing while I'm typing.
Really? I can certainly type while thinking cause I did so while writing this very sentence, and I have assumed that they are pipelined and improving one without another is meaningless up to some threshold. I should note that I don't think in English, but I can pull English words incrementally from my mind so I don't think that matters much anyway.
In orienteering, people are taught to stop before making important decisions.
I've been orienteering and the only time I'd stop is when the terrain didn't allow safely reading the map while in a jog. Or when I encounter an unexpected landmark, indicating I lost my orientation. Otherwise everything is planned while moving towards and scanning for the next waypoint in the queue.
I can't really read the article as it went down for me so the article may have already mentioned this, but I think touch typing is a bit more important than the raw typing speed, which heavily depends on the exact text and personal conditions.
I type reasonably fast (about 120 WPM on a good day, 100 WPM on a normal day, according to Monkeytype), but I've said for quite awhile that you get around 95% of the benefit of fast typing by simply getting to 50 WPM.
I do think that there's value in being able to touch-type, but I think the benefits after that tail-off pretty quickly.
Getting faster at typing is fun, and it won't "hurt" you or anything, but like many things, I think a lot of the benefits are overhyped.
I never cared that I was slow, I’m fast enough. I do wish I was more accurate though.
If we have two hypothetical programmers: L, who can type at 300 billion characters per second, and S, who can type at 60 characters per hour; then saying that L will write worse code than S is quite uncharitable.
In fact I would expect L to write better code. Because L can afford to spend all day carefully considering the code to write, perhaps even testing various approaches, while S will need to start earlier in order to get anything done. Because being 2 lines through a 6 line function is awkward when its time to pick up the kids from school, gonna be difficult to get back in the right headspace on return.
Imagine if you type very slowly. You first take your time to consider what to write and when you're finally certain what to do you start typing. But when you've finished only the type declaration your alarm clock rings because you have to go pick up the kids.
So you go pick up the kids and when you're back home you have dinner and then you help the kids with their homework and by the time you can get back to what you were doing you have forgotten where you were. You could try to recollect what you had decided on, but that would be pointless because it'd be time to call it a night when you're back where you were.
So then you have to punt it to the next day, and then you get back to it and finish the task. But because you type so slowly there isn't enough time to properly document it and write test cases. So you have to do that the following day.
Whereas if you can type fast you could have finished writing the code before you have to go pick up the kids. So then you could write the documentation and test cases after helping them with the homework. And most of the time you gained was not gained because you write sloppy code or did half a million things at the same time. It was gained because you didn't have to spend half a day trying to figure out what you had decided to do in the first place.
It's better to spend 7 hours carefully planning the code and 1 hour writing the code than spending 4 hours planning the code and 4 hours writing it. Typing slow is bad because you have less time to think. Typing fast is good because you have more time to think.
That's also a fact that the easiest an activity becomes the more we can become addicted to do it without thinking. The less we look for alternatives.
Why doing a meeting of 30min when 3000 lines of code can do it. Who cares who will maintain our code as long as we become the hero of the team by typing 10.000 loc overnight.
We are the faster. We win every discussion by typing more and faster. We impress. We throw more jira issues in backlog than everyone else. We dont see the need to slow down or refuse a task because our typing speed gives us more privilege and power.
So one key thing is becoming constrained also makes us more creative at problem solving. Maybe working more is not the key, maybe coding more is not the key goal. Maybe one line of code or a product can solve our problem. Maybe some llm, maybe our of our 100 ideas per minute, only one is relevant and maybe it won't be useful by next week. Good ideas are not always the newest ones.
I also consider on average programmers read more code than they write. I've often helped very busy people whose time was focused on reinventing the wheel and frameworks because they were proud of their coding skills and avoided looking elsewhere for existing solutions. I also haven't been the fastest programmer but always the one able to read code and find bugs better than peers. I'm not proud of typing more unnecessary and buggy code which will then slow us down through debugging and maintenance.
Observability, and quality is important, more than quantity and speed. And as for most things, speed also amplify some negativity, chaos and noise, in my experiences.
In the earliest days of the Internet, every Cisco router installation included a community of dedicated monks who painstakingly cleared the EVIL bit and copied each packet to each outbound interface in a hex editor.
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
Fast typists have been in demand ever since the studios ceased broadcasting cartoons live. It was these heroic figures who transferred lightning-quick creativity from inkpot and paintbrush, to keyboard and mouse.
I find it very useful that I can quickly have my ideas flow from my mind into the screen.
Couple of instances where I want to be able to type _very_ quickly is when I'm (a) taking notes while someone is talking or (b) writing out a lengthy code block I don't need to think that hard about. Other than that, typing at a modest speed is good enough.
Combine it with 10 gig fibre browsing and working
typing without looking at the keyboard is.
Typing fast(er) for me went hand-in-hand with the fun of experimenting with mechanical keyboards. Once you hit a certain stride, there is a satisfying audible and haptic feedback that settles into a gratifying rhythm as you compose your thoughts on screen. Do yourself a favor and invest in a keyboard that pleases you if you have to clack (or thock) into the void for more than a couple hours per day.
It's the same as with driving. You can either drive very deliberately and consciously, where your whole focus is the road, or you can 'switch to automatic' where you're actually thinking about something else entirely.
For driving, maybe focus-mode is best. But typing should be automatic.