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Comment by Rochus | Hacker News Reader

That's a joke, isn't it? It says "Software Intern Please invert a binary tree instead... You type C at 17 words/minute (185 chars/minute) with 100% accuracy."

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* > 60 10x engineer [Turns out they do exist, after all.]

* > 50 Distinguished engineer [Jeff Dean would be proud.]

* > 40 Staff engineer [That was fast.]

* > 30 Senior engineer [Not bad but.. where would you be without Stack Overflow?]

* > 20 Junior engineer [You type fast... just don't break prod.]

* > 10 Software Intern [Please invert a binary tree instead...]

* <= 10 Hello, world [Back to the programming whiteboard...]

full list. I'm ~ 50wpm and it was apparent that I never maintain that speed except for short bursts. I consider myself on the slower side compared to some people I've worked with before. I have never had any motivation to type code faster FWIW.

Yes, definitely a joke :D You get a different message depending on the words/min typed

I see ;-) Also the words/minute figure is questionable if I type 185 chars/minute.

That's a good point - words/min isn't a great way to measure code typing speed. Right now I use whitespaces to delimit "words" - maybe I should also delimit by parentheses and punctuation? e.g. "Object.create(http.IncomingMessage.prototype)" is a very long word :D

Not sure whether there is any standardized way to measure words in programming languages. The natural unit would be tokens, but these are even more language dependend than words of a natural language. Chars/minute makes more sense.

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