It's not about whether others care how fast you can type. It's about how quickly you can get your ideas into the computer. Between coding, writing documents, emails, and Slack, a lot of your day is spent typing. If you can improve your typing speed by 20%, you may have just reduced the time it takes to do your job by like 5%, which is meaningful!

Dan Luu has a really good post that outlines why working on things like typing speed can be extremely valuable and basically a force multiplier on everything else you do as an engineer.

https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/

While no one cares, if you type really really slow, then it will impact your performance.

This is like saying running fast is not important to football. It is true, but if you run really really slow like a 100y old, then you can't play football.

If you need to type that fast, get an IDE to autogenerate the boilerplate so that you can get to the more interesting bits.

I’ve worked with people who chicken peck, etc and is just not an issue. Clarity of thought is much more valuable.

It is the same with being smart but run really slow.

No amount of boilerplate can help you.

At the end of the day, you need to type fast enough above a certain threshold to be a programmer.

For example, I would say if you type <10 wpm, you cannot be a good programmer.

There is definitely a number that makes sense.

Luckily programming is not football and you can take all your time to write the code. I'm commenting this thinking about impaired people that either type with one finger or even by other means, not touching the keyboard.

It is actually a great analogy.

If you work for yourself, feel free to take all the time you need.

The same for playing football casually.

In a work environment, you can't take all the time you need.

I would imagine being able to touch type is absolutely essential for using Vim effectively, or any primarily CLI workflow, especially if the screen is far from the keyboard.

It really tires my neck out to look up and down every few seconds if I work somewhere with a large distance. Usually not an issue though, since I'm rarely in a CLI for more than 10 minutes.

Learning to touch type frees up your mind to focus on coding problems.

I agree that speed is not important, but I believe every dev would benefit from learning how to type properly.