Hey, I feel called out on this. I type with 2/3 fingers and I'm quite fast even if not like a full fledged 10 fingers typist. At my age I don't think I will ever learn typing with 10 fingers, but I think I don't need it either.
There's a fluency effect that happens when you're able to touch type without looking, similar to when you master a language enough to speak without thinking. You become more efficient because you dissolve the barrier between your thoughts and their expression.
I know there are lots of arguments intending to counter the importance of touch-typing in programming ("most of my time is spent thinking"), but I think those miss the point. Faster typing is just as valuable whether you're programming, or writing an email, or responding to a message.
Usually when someone says "touch typing" they refer to the standard "home row" approach, using all fingers. I could have made that more explicit.
I touch type.
I use 4 fingers on my left hand and 3 fingers on my right to type. (This is counting thumbs on both hands)
I've never really understood the home row because if my hands are on the keyboard I'm actively typing (or playing video games), in which case all my fingers are busy actually doing things, so I basically just put my hands down where I'm going to start typing anyway. When I'm actively typing I'm not wasting time moving my hands back to the home row, either.
Only during the most rare occasion, those 10 fingers will give up their self-designated posts and come to this massive array of buttons to do their exercise of pressing stuff, something like "su apt install", "dock run", "cd.." etc.
I'd say type fast != work fast, so I don't mind if someone is a slow button presser :)
I type with only two/three fingers. I don't hunt and peck, but I'm no touch typist either. I can type faster just with my index fingers than some people with all of their fingers.
That said, typing speed is not critical. I mean, if you're really slow I guess it matters, but it's no measure of the quality of your work. The brain is the bottleneck here, and all the slowness happens in the design/troubleshoot/think space anyway.
I use nearly all fingers, but where i really suffer is that i find key-combinations, notably alt+ to be really awkward because my hands are at a steep angle relative to the straight keyboard.
I live in Kakoune (vim-like) so "touch typing" is my bread and butter, but home-row just feels so bad to me.
I keep meaning to try a split keyboard with home-row. I suspect that's the root of my issue, and that my odd typing pattern is a result of trying to manually replicate a split keyboard. /shrug
https://mechboards.co.uk/shop/kits/helidox-corne-kit/#case
With small keyboards, you’re trading off physical distance between keys for having to press more buttons simultaneously. Might fix your problems with reaching key combinations, but the combinations themselves do become more complicated as well.
So far i've not felt i could get software to do the modal editing i speak of reliably in all of my environments. I'm on NixOS right now, and i didn't want to manage the software. It definitely is interesting though!
I'm still painfully slow. Maybe 50wpm tops for natural language, embarrassingly much less for programming.
Thing is, I'm now even slower than I was before "taking the plunge", and I can't even go back to my old loose method I've nurtured for 20 years!
On the flipside, as you mentioned, typing in itself isn't a huge bottleneck, especially with autocomplete, and I'm much faster navigating the ide. So maybe it's a net positive after all.
Besides, I don't blame him, he was performing the job he was paid for.
Thank you for reminding me that it's about time for my yearly reread of Pro Git. It's amazing how many people look at you like you're a wizard when you just...read the documentation.
It feels like cheating, but I put my imposter syndrome in a trash bin years ago.
As a freelancer, every time a client decides for a cheaper alternative, I make very clear I would be delighted to work with them in the future anyway. It rarely fails, one or more years later, the clients calls me back because their cheap alternative turned out to suck and be expensive eventually. Last month, a client from Luxembourg called after 6 years of total silence. They still had me in their listing. 3 years ago, one called me because 2 years prior, the 50k quote they rejected from me turned into a 400K bill from my competitor, and still no release yet.
My rates have been steadily increasing for years thanks to this. Before, geeks were at a disadvantage because people didn't know better, and teams with a good marketing would destroy us. But now, they have been burned so many times. And it pays because more and more devs coming to the market are becoming dependent on their tooling. Now, more often than not, I work with teams that have been copy/pasting git commands not knowing what they do, that have never, ever looked the source code of their framework or don't know how to use a debugger. The HN bubbles tends to blind us to the reality of the corporate world.
Yesterday I did a deployment, but was not allowed to touch the machine. Instead, they made me call a guy sharing a screen of a Vista machine, while he was sshing prod using cmd.exe, and I had to dictate him the instructions to debug the deployment on their custom linux setup. A near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers, pressing 30 times the up arrow to find a bash command in the history every time. He could click on WinSCP very well though.
This 20 minutes job turned into an afternoon of billing.
Though I suppose that's what I look like as a Python expert to an old timer from the 80s that can code in assembly, debug using strace and understand L1 cache :)
People are scared we are going to get automatized by AI.
I am preparing for the most lucrative decade I ever worked in.