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Comment by 98codes | Hacker News Reader

When I was in the 8th grade (back in the 1900s), I took a typing elective class, because I figured if I was going to be in front of a keyboard typing for a living as a programmer, I should learn to do it right.

That was a rare very good decision for kid me back then, and it's paid off ever since.

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Same. Can touch type accurately while maintaining eye contact during a meeting. Young people find it unnerving.

Just did this today. When people ask I tell them I'm a big Ray Charles fan.

What? You guys are talking about this as if touch typing is some rare skill. I'm pretty sure everyone around the office touch-types, all my friends definitely do.

A shocking number of my colleagues never learned. It’s no longer routinely taught in school. Many people have to look at their fingers when they type. This includes people who write code for a living.

I worked at FAANG and at a few mid tier companies and in my experience that hasn’t been the case with majority of my coworkers surprisingly

Huh, really? I'm very surprised, I'll look around the office with more intention and take an informal mental poll.

Yeah - definitely there's always a few engineers with custom keyboards who type like 200wpm but on average its folks who seem to look down occasionally and type fairly slow (noticable when they're screensharing)

Opposite experience: I hated the school class and I remember some frustrating tools which, if you made an error, counted any reflexive backspace and corrected letter as two additional errors...

What really turned me into a touch-typist was all the arguing I did over dial-up internet the next summer.

same on both. On dial-up; I learned to touch type so I could insult my opponent after killing them, but before they re-spawned and could attack me again in a video game.

StarCraft multiplayer here - had to get messages out quickly in between controlling units.

Starseige:Tribes - Typing in spare time on a ballistic trajectory... Though a good deal of that was also tapping out 3-4 keystrokes for the "V" communication tree, something that I think a lot of games could benefit from even in this era where there's enough bandwidth for voice chat.

With the amazing amount of client-side scripting the game supported, people made their own variations on the communications system, even carefully playing audio clips over one-another to get new speech.

Likewise in high school in the 1900s I took typing, which did markedly improve my typing though I am sure I didn't keep up with the technique I learned. We also learned all the standard letter formats and so on which I promptly forgot.

I measured myself the other day and I can do about 110-115 WPM, which I think is pretty impressive for a 50 year old who last took typing classes at 15.

Oy, veh. "High school in the 1900s". Make me feel old, why don'tcha.

Was mandatory at my high school; the only way to avoid it was a once-a-year typing test that was not advertised - you had to ask or hear about it. If you could do 35 wpm without errors, you didn’t have to take the class.

I probably had enough cachet with the teachers that I could have weaseled my way into taking it until I passed, but I did pass it, so problem solved.

9th grade for me. The teacher actually just graded us on speed and accuracy, that was my only C in high school. It served me well, however, I got up to 40 WPM and have kept to around 30 during my career (always fast enough it seems). Also, model M PC Jr. keyboards, so I can’t really complain too much.

It was my mom that told me to take touch typing. Said I'd be glad I did.

She was right.

You were typing on a keyboard in the 1900s huh? ;) Same here - in the 1990s I made the same decision, and it was one of the best of my life. Cheers.

I didn’t take typing lessons, but I’ve been typing since the 1980s, probably since 1987. At some point, I discovered that people typed without looking, decided that using 10 fingers and typing without looking at the keyboard was better, so I started optimizing for it, and it worked.

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