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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

I can guarantee you it's not a case of "I can't do this, so I'll criticize it". I'm actually a decent 2-finger typist, and this has never limited me when troubleshooting a problem or designing a solution. Engineering problems are seldom solved by typing really fast.

I'm fine with you improving your WPM, I just don't think it's a worthwhile endeavor -- it's not making you more efficient where it matters. Likewise, I could improve my WPM, this is not rocket science and anyone can do it with training. It's not even hard training.

But why? I could also train to run faster, but would it help me do my job better?

edit: out of curiosity, and this proves nothing either way, I tried your monkeytype link and got 90 WPM with 97% ACC.

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Are you sure about that? I trust you if you are truly, TRULY sure...

Imagine you had a tool similar to those ChatGPT IDE auto-complete plugins, except instead of doing chat GPT it typed what was in your mind.

Imagine you start work in the morning, and there is a 0ms response time from what you think, and huge blocks of code would appear instantly.

Is your work such that you TRULY only type 300 words per day? Or, do you also... write tests, write boilerplate, write for loops you've written thousands of times, write and read files, call/build APIs, write command line tools.

If you can imagine some kind of "instant feedback" typing thing quite literally not improving your quality of life whatsoever, then I guess you are just in a rare boat. I can't visualize any circumstance where 80WPM typing would not benefit them, but I suppose there might be a world of developers out there who truly live in a vaccuum like one of my other comments said... they just come in to work, dont communicate with anyone, dont write anything other than a 50 line file with a few hundred words in it, and leave after 8 hours)

> Are you sure about that? I trust you if you are truly, TRULY sure...

Yes, I'm sure. Isn't this what I'm saying?

Are you sure running faster wouldn't improve your engineering job?

> Imagine you had a tool similar to those ChatGPT IDE auto-complete plugins, except instead of doing chat GPT it typed what was in your mind.

I use ChatGPT on occasion. I spend way more time trying to frame the question and understanding whether what ChatGPT spewed out makes sense than actually typing the question.

> Is your work such that you TRULY only type 300 words per day? Or, do you also... write tests, write boilerplate, write for loops you've written thousands of times, write and read files, call/build APIs, write command line tools.

I've spent more time typing words in this thread with you than I'll write the rest of the day for my job.

(If you find yourself writing lots of boilerplate, may I suggest that may be a real place to focus on improving, rather than on how fast you can type boilerplate?)

The only other place where I'll spend time typing is in chat. Let me assure you my typing speed is more than enough there too, and I really don't want stream of consciousness typing in my job chat -- that would get me fired fast. And for social typing, how much speed do you truly need to type "hey, what's for lunch?" or "hey, did you read this news? <link>".

Yes I don't mean literally chatGPT, thats why I said "except it would type from your mind" to eliminate the focus on chatGPT being wrong.

Alright I concede if that's really your use case. I wrote in another comment but I manage 3 separate companies that I started, and I'm the single developer on all of them, and I do everything on them (frontend, backend, infrastructure, data architecture/analysis, etc). So it's definitely not true for me. I have enough experience with my friends working at companies though to know they STILL would benefit, but it sounds like you escape this characterization somehow, so I believe you.

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