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Comment by danielharan | Hacker News Reader

It's not a "real" issue, so much as a proxy. I've never seen a good hacker look at their keyboard, whereas there are plenty of people that get out of flow looking for a symbol.

If a person can't type, I simply assume they're a noob and don't want them on my team. I don't expect them to have a very different ration of thinking vs. coding though :)

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I can see that - it's like musicians that don't rate musicians who can't play piano.

But - I guess I've seen a few counter-examples in coding - e.g. I used to know a mainframe guy who had arthritic pain. He coded very slowly indeed, but it flowed out of him flawlessly.... So I tend not to have that bias.

If I met someone who wanted to get into programming, I certainly wouldn't say "practice your typing" - I'd say, "read these books".

I probably wouldn't tell somebody to go practice typing either, but that's not because it isn't important. I would just take it for granted that they could already type.

Actually, I'd say 'read these books' and 'learn to type'. Half of development is communication - writing emails, comments, docs, whatever. Why wouldn't one benefit from entering text more quickly?

Anyways, there are probably a subset of slow typists that are good programmers. But I'd be surprised if they weren't the exception.

I used to feel this way, but then I discovered that the resident uber programmer at work is a two finger typist. He is brilliant; used to work at Xerox Parc and all that.

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