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Comment by personjerry | Hacker News Reader

As a professional software engineer, I always found I generally spent more time thinking than actually typing. I'm curious, what kinds of technical roles require such a large amount of typing?

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It's not about the number of hours per day that you spend typing. It's about the number of seconds you have to hold an idea in your head.

I've found that the more senior I got through my career the more typing I had to do. The more senior you are, the more time you spend writing plans, documentation, designs, and of course copious amounts of emails as part of communication. Now I'm in management, and I type more than I ever did in any of the engineering roles that I held. Perhaps consequently, I've taken ergonomics and keyboard quality really seriously.

why not get a keyboard that is twice as difficult to type on, then, if optimizing for typing speed makes no difference? why not 10x? if you flip it around it's obvious why people would want good keyboards. to my mind, it's strictly less silly than wanting, say, a good/fancy car (which, though a luxury, i view as a perfectly reasonable thing to want as well). people don't buy porsches (e.g.) because they have "such a large amount" of driving in their jobs and/or lives-- they buy them to make the driving they do do better.

Tennis players spend way more time moving around than hitting the ball. And yet, they use the best racket they can find.

Verbose languages like C++.

email and slack. I joke, but some fields really do work the computer more than others. My roommate is in design and was sent home with a workstation to do their 3d modelling. It sounds like he is playing starcraft for 8 hours a day, but that's the job. Nonstop clicking and clacking until he clocks out without a single pause.

Can confirm. I worked as an animator when I was young and that was very taxing on the hands.

I also worked as a designer and developed forearm pain from the Photoshop shortcuts.

Now I work as a programmer and things are a lot easier. But I suspect it’s only a matter of time before even this is too much and I’ll need to change it up again.

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