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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to give what I know is an unpopular opinion and then I’m going to contradict myself.

Your typing speed has no affect on your ability to be a good developer. While I don’t “hunt and peck” and I can type without looking at the keyboard most of the time, I physically can’t touch type.

I type with one hand and I’ve been programming since 1986 as a hobbyist for 10 years and then a professional. Last time I checked, I typed at about 45 wpm.

Most of my professional career though I’ve used statically typed language and from 2010-2020 mostly C# with JetBrains R# - with excellent shortcuts and autocomplete.

I just started working on my first project with the assistance of ChatGPT. It’s amazing how well it does at taking regular English sentences and writing and modifying Python and JavaScript code - even less typing.

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"Your typing speed has no affect on your ability to be a good developer."

I think you mean to say that your ability to type at 45 wpm has a minimal impact on your ability to be a good developer. To me, 45 wpm is moderate but not slow. I have seen developers who type at around 10-15 wpm.

I have noticed that developers who are slower typers are more likely to fight back on simple changes and writing documentation. It just takes them more time to do the same amount of work that a faster typist will take. In my experience, slow typer are great at reasoning about the code base and coming up with designs in their head, but poor at writing code and communicating with text either through email/slack or documentation.

People who are not fast typist can be very smart but will always be at a disadvantage when it comes to using the keyboard.

> nouveaux

Refactoring is also where statically typed languages combined with good IDEs that have a large set of automated provable correct refactoring shortcuts come in.

Also, I type a lot faster on my phone than a keyboard. I met my manager for the first time in person a year after he became my manager (Covid travel restrictions). In our first team meeting, I mentioned that if he sees my typing on my phone a lot it’s because I am on Slack talking to my coworkers or customers (I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech specializing in cloud application development and “DevOps”).

As far as documentation, my job requires a lot of writing.

For my current project I’m writing a lot of small one off Python scripts. You would be surprised how well ChatGPT can “explain” what a script involving AWS automation does in plain English and I can even ask it “Why would I use this” and it often gives me a good enough bottom line up front summary.

I've been a professional developer for more than 10 years and I have similar observation. Most of developers don't use touch typing. And it doesn't seem to affect their efficiency at all. Developers usually don't need to produce large amount of code (unless you are Go developer ;) ). They use auto-completion, copy-paste and usually need to do a short edits and not 20 lines of non-stop typing. So even though I use touch typing myself, I've never seen this as a big advantage making me somehow better than others. I see benefits only when I am in a long chat discussions.

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