Typing fast is not so important | Hacker News Reader

Typing fast is not so important

morgan.zoemp.be

32 pointsfreediver55 comments

Typing fast isn’t important for coding, or writing, or any kind of productive tasks. As long as a person types fast enough to get the job done, it’s not the bottleneck. Thinking of what to type is the bottleneck.

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.

Yeah, when I was a kid one of my biggest motivators to type faster was chatting with people. I got faster at typing because I "had" to, because it bothered me when I wasn't able to get a message across as fast as I was thinking it. It probably helped I took piano lessons as a kid as well... I type around 130wpm these days and indeed, am very active in work discussions via text.

I type at a similar speed and I attribute it to playing MMOs as a kid. You had to type really fast if you wanted to make callouts during fights without dying. :-)

I think you are 100% right.

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.

Being a kid/teen in the 90s into the early 00s, online chatting and gaming before voice comms were common definitely led to me learning to touch type very very fast and accurately.

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.

It continues to boggle my mind why there would be engineers who cannot touch type - not just for speed but because your brain now has to spend part of its processing cycles trying to find the next key on the keyboard.

Maybe we have different definitions of "touch typing"?

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.

Do you look at the keyboard?

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.

> Do you look at the keyboard?

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.

Indeed, my English typing was significantly improved once I had to type a lot in IRC---I can type around 120 WPM nowadays. That said, the tendency to do Slack huddles seems much more complex than typing speed. Writing has an intrinsic delay compared to speaking, and that delay can sometimes suppress important informations without realizing. For that reason I'm fine with huddles from managers, but would prefer a dedicated meeting or textual conversation over other huddles.

I'm a fast typist but horribly slow at typing on a phone. Whenever I'm in a fast and deep group conversation I feel compelled to go to a computer to keep up with the pace.

I totally noticed that the most active persons in a conversation are those who type the fastest, and conversely. Seems totally logical.

I find the exact same logic applies for native Vs non-native speakers. It's a sliding scale not a binary of course, but yes the higher the information density and the more nuance can be transmitted then the higher bandwidth and the more that individual tends to participate/lead the conversation. Not necessarily correlated with the quality of their thinking

Steve Yegge wrote about this ages ago: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...

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.

> You think, then you type. They happen at different times!

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.

Physical and mental activities compete for resources.

In orienteering, people are taught to stop before making important decisions.

I don't know how much resource is shared for physical and mental activies (my wild guess is "a bit but not much", but I don't have any backing evidence), but I'm sure that important decisions are exceptions rather than norms.

Learning to touch type is all about automating the typing, reducing the cognitive load. The load is reduced to a point where one is thinking ahead a few words and the typing sub-process (as in sub-conscious) works the queue. That queue can be dozens of characters long. But stick one non-touch char in there and the queue blocks until that char is cleared.

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 meant for coding. Typically I have to think for a bit before I decide what code I want to write.

> because for the most part you don't think while you type.

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.

Not only is typing speed not a significant factor, neither do I find that thinking speed is either. The most important thing is what to think about and what to notice. Going in the right direction and not changing directions frequently and arbitrarily is what more than makes up for speed.

Knowing your tools and underlying tech is also a must and the better you know it the better your intuition will be.

I think it depends.

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)

> for the most part you don't think while you type. You think, then you type. They happen at different times!

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.

I learned touch typing long after the beginning of my pro developer career. That made a huge difference. The main benefit is it make typing easy. Which is important when writing docs and comments. And with that I can handle much more because there is no need to keep all in my head. I can write it down, switch the task, then come back. Also helps organizing my thoughts. I can write them down while thinking, then easily scroll back and forth. It's never too late, I definitely recommend you to learn touch typing, if you are not working for the government of course. There are many websites which make it fun and easy.

Your typing just shouldn't lag behind your thoughts. Once you are fast enough, working on it will have diminishing returns.

Agreed, though different people have different thresholds for "enough". 100 WPM seems to be conservative enough for most people including me though, so that is a good target.

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.

And when your typing does lag behind your thoughts it makes coding a huge chore. Asking for changes in PRs becomes a huge burden.

Link didn't load for me, but at least I can say that I agree with the title.

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.

Original blog author here. The link should load now.

Typing fast is incredibly useful for taking notes during meetings. If you can basically transcribe the conversation in real time, it helps a lot. Ofc you could record and run it through TTS, but that's overhead, gives you a messy huge textfile with lots of unnecessary information, and has privacy/legal issues

This is almost like saying money won't bring you happiness. Absolutely true at the high end, but for most people just a little more would have a pretty big impact on smoothing out their day to day life but there are diminishing returns. Going from hunting and pecking at 10wpm to touch typing at 60wpm is going to be a huge productivity improvement if you work on a computer on a regular basis. But going from 60wpm to 120wpm won't make nearly as much of a difference.

I’ve been writing code for money for 10 years. I’m a terrible typer, probably 40WPM and not consistently touch typing.

I never cared that I was slow, I’m fast enough. I do wish I was more accurate though.

For removing code or reading code, no need to be a fast typer and those activities are key part of learning and being productive

Please don't conflate typing faster with typing sooner.

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.

I'm not inclined to encourage multitasking just by rushing throwing more code while also driving while also writing a message to the kids while also eating. It's also charitable to take the time to focus. And maybe think about how this code is not worth it or not urgent anyway. And doing less can be good

At some point you do need to write at least some code. Can't really go to a hospital and say 'oh, the code that drives the MRI scanner isn't really necessary, you can always try other methods to figure out what's wrong with the patient'. And if some code HAS to be written it's important that you're able to type fast so you can take your time and think about what to write.

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.

Typing fast is good but not so important as typing the right thing. Less is more and that's one of the key messages. There are degrees between typing fast and slow. I have the impression people are only able to see either extreme. The more we urge ourselves to eat fast, walk fast, do everything fast, the more anxiety we throw ourselves into, the more nervous we become when others are not fast enough, the less patience we develop, the more we tempt and bias ourselves to think more and fast is needed. There is no problem writing 1000 words per minute if we can so why would we think our text is repetitive ? After all we are good at typing, let's type while everyone is struggling to keep up with our rythme. Let's create more code to maintain, more code to debug, let's make big fonctions, long pull requests, let's be tempted to spam the chat and answer everything we can because we type fast enough. Let's skip the lunch because we will quickly answer them. Let's engage in more social networks because we have the bandwidth with our typing speed.

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.

To this day, the best way to practice typing, for me, is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead

Typing of the Dead Overkill is pretty great too.

Link is not loading for me.

Same. Might've been hugged, though I doubt it considering how recently it's been added.

Please allow enough time for the Belgian webmaster to type in the HTML+CSS after you send your GET request.

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.

https://www.wired.com/story/simpsons-live-animated-episode/

The Belgian webmaster is aiming at moving away from the current tech stack and vps provider. For avoiding this kind of situation.

It's back online. My vps provider is cheap for reasons...

I've been writing code for almost 30 years. I don't touch-type and don't use all fingers, but still manage 125wpm and can type without looking at the keyboard. I've not put any additional time just to learn to type, it just happens over the years.

I find it very useful that I can quickly have my ideas flow from my mind into the screen.

If you type without looking, you're touch typing. Maybe you're not a strict home row user, but that has little to do with touch typing outside of formal learning. It took typing on a split ergo keyboard for me to figure out I was using "weird" fingers to press certain keys. I don't use the home row either. My resting position is Shift-A-(W/S)-D for my left hand (muscle memory from FPS games I'm sure) and M-K-L-/ for my right hand. I tend to only use my pinkies for modifier keys and my index fingers work overtime stretching to cover the middle of the keyboard. I still manage to type ~100wpm without trying too hard.

How I learned this is when I took up learning a new (custom) keyboard layout, I realized that I don't actually type that much for work or play in a day. I had to specifically do typing exercises to pick it up faster. I probably still only type at 70 wpm on the new layout but my hands are way more comfortable now.

Link won't load for me.

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.

Link is back

I learned to touch-type over 40 years ago (on an IBM Selectic). I'm not the fastest, but the advantage is that I don't even think about typing anymore, the words pretty much flow automatically out of my fingers.

Faster typing can mean faster thinking and faster iterating.

Combine it with 10 gig fibre browsing and working

typing fast is not

typing without looking at the keyboard is.

I do agree on this (original blog author here)

...but it is fun!

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.

But typing without having to think about typing, is.

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.

Typing is already easy enough. We overload the world with more texts and more code. We use AI-based summarizers anyway if too long, which is bad. Same for long code reviews, details are then overlooked. We write hundred pages essays to avoid the effort of slowing down and clarify our thinking. We neglect thinking and right to the point sentences because it's too easy to type fast and long, we feel the urge to react and to feel productive even if it's not. The urge to drive fast, to push more code, to write more. And put the pressure on everyone else to follow along with the melody. I would love more thinking and focused people, more careful too, and more aware people instead of having all of them wanting to type more and faster.

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