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I've worked several programming jobs since switching to Dvorak, and it has never been an issue---it takes < 10 seconds to change the layout OS-wide. No need to request a special keyboard (and I leave my keycaps as QWERTY because I touch-type anyways).

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Touch-typing is the key, if you have to look at the keys regularly then switching to a new layout will be an order of magnitude more difficult.

I learned dvorak by printing out the layout and glancing over at the paper while typing back in high school. It took me about a month to get comfortable and I'm now basically a touch-typing bilinguist (though I'm slower at qwerty, it's more mental effort to do the conversion on the fly since my muscle memory is dvorak).

Nice learning hack.

I did the same thing! And I'm embarrassingly slower at qwerty now.

The best part for me was when I first started having dvorak reflexes on a qwerty keyboard.

Agreed. I'll add that if you can't touch-type, your keyboard layout is the least of your problems. Take a few days off and learn.

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