Typing is bursty. You don’t type much usually, but sometimes there’s a lot of it. Effortless typing minimizes interruptions and allows to stay in the zone for longer. It isn’t just about the time spent typing, it’s about typing at the speed of thought so you don’t switch contexts from thinking to typing.

Typing is bursty, agreed. I'm not saying someone who is an extremely slow hunt-and-pecker is ideal.

What I'm saying is that, past an average typing speed, obsessing over WPM gets you diminishing returns, because that's not where the bottleneck is. You should rather spend time improving other aspects of your process, but of course, "thinking better/smarter" is harder to improve.

For the record, I never measured WPM but I'm mostly a fast 2-fingers typist. All keys are typed with my index fingers, and the spacebar with the thumb and some of the special (shift, CTRL, etc) keys with some other finger.

I will lose every competition with a WPM-focused typist, but I can guarantee you my effective tasks -- the actual job we're meant to complete -- will not take me longer, unless said job is transcribing a document (which is never my job).

If you are a 2 finger typist and also think people are "obsessing over WPM" because they're wanting to utilize their own tools to the fullest advantage, that sounds like some mental block kind of thing.

If you can type at least 80 consistently then thats probably would I imagine the dividing line is between "flow/concentration not breaking" and "breaks constantly"

Try a 50 word monkeytype https://monkeytype.com/

> If you are a 2 finger typist and also think people are "obsessing over WPM" because they're wanting to utilize their own tools to the fullest advantage, that sounds like some mental block kind of thing.

I get frustrated by this kind of replies on HN.

Please don't try to "fix" me. I'm telling you my WPM are not limiting, because -- like almost ALL coders and engineers -- I spend most of my time elsewhere, and that 2-fingers is fast enough. I will not solve a Data Engineering problem by typing fast.

I probably type faster with 2 fingers than you. Maybe not, but I've seen me "win" over people who type with all fingers, and that's good enough for me.

So thanks, but no thanks?

I'm not trying to fix it, just engaging in a dialog, and I said it "sounds like", because your first thought when reading about people using their tools effectively is that they're "obsessing" about it. A lot of people care greatly about efficiency (me), and having someone who can't actually type fast or seem to care about efficiency then tells you you're obsessing about it seems like the hallmark "I cant do X thing so I will criticize it instead"

Are you at least over 60 WPM? I think I said in another comment that I think 60 WPM is probably the lowest I can imagine not constantly breaking your focus while trying to hold ideas in your mind, especially if you do data engineering and youre going multiple layers deep.

I can guarantee you it's not a case of "I can't do this, so I'll criticize it". I'm actually a decent 2-finger typist, and this has never limited me when troubleshooting a problem or designing a solution. Engineering problems are seldom solved by typing really fast.

I'm fine with you improving your WPM, I just don't think it's a worthwhile endeavor -- it's not making you more efficient where it matters. Likewise, I could improve my WPM, this is not rocket science and anyone can do it with training. It's not even hard training.

But why? I could also train to run faster, but would it help me do my job better?

edit: out of curiosity, and this proves nothing either way, I tried your monkeytype link and got 90 WPM with 97% ACC.

Are you sure about that? I trust you if you are truly, TRULY sure...

Imagine you had a tool similar to those ChatGPT IDE auto-complete plugins, except instead of doing chat GPT it typed what was in your mind.

Imagine you start work in the morning, and there is a 0ms response time from what you think, and huge blocks of code would appear instantly.

Is your work such that you TRULY only type 300 words per day? Or, do you also... write tests, write boilerplate, write for loops you've written thousands of times, write and read files, call/build APIs, write command line tools.

If you can imagine some kind of "instant feedback" typing thing quite literally not improving your quality of life whatsoever, then I guess you are just in a rare boat. I can't visualize any circumstance where 80WPM typing would not benefit them, but I suppose there might be a world of developers out there who truly live in a vaccuum like one of my other comments said... they just come in to work, dont communicate with anyone, dont write anything other than a 50 line file with a few hundred words in it, and leave after 8 hours)

> Are you sure about that? I trust you if you are truly, TRULY sure...

Yes, I'm sure. Isn't this what I'm saying?

Are you sure running faster wouldn't improve your engineering job?

> Imagine you had a tool similar to those ChatGPT IDE auto-complete plugins, except instead of doing chat GPT it typed what was in your mind.

I use ChatGPT on occasion. I spend way more time trying to frame the question and understanding whether what ChatGPT spewed out makes sense than actually typing the question.

> Is your work such that you TRULY only type 300 words per day? Or, do you also... write tests, write boilerplate, write for loops you've written thousands of times, write and read files, call/build APIs, write command line tools.

I've spent more time typing words in this thread with you than I'll write the rest of the day for my job.

(If you find yourself writing lots of boilerplate, may I suggest that may be a real place to focus on improving, rather than on how fast you can type boilerplate?)

The only other place where I'll spend time typing is in chat. Let me assure you my typing speed is more than enough there too, and I really don't want stream of consciousness typing in my job chat -- that would get me fired fast. And for social typing, how much speed do you truly need to type "hey, what's for lunch?" or "hey, did you read this news? <link>".

Yes I don't mean literally chatGPT, thats why I said "except it would type from your mind" to eliminate the focus on chatGPT being wrong.

Alright I concede if that's really your use case. I wrote in another comment but I manage 3 separate companies that I started, and I'm the single developer on all of them, and I do everything on them (frontend, backend, infrastructure, data architecture/analysis, etc). So it's definitely not true for me. I have enough experience with my friends working at companies though to know they STILL would benefit, but it sounds like you escape this characterization somehow, so I believe you.

I spend over 10+ hours a day typing at the computer, across slack, writing specs, writing code, etc. So really I suppose in my mind I don't live in a vaccuum.

I don't fetishize it at all, in my mind it is a simple objective fact that I actually experience myself. Fast typing is up there with Vim as one of the literal most productive things I have ever done, with the 3rd being memorizing hundreds if not thousands of OS/app hotkeys.

Writing specs is a key bit here that I'd generalize as: I think by typing. The hardest problems I troubleshoot are worked through with best quality if I am typing up a worklog of stuff tried, rather than taking no notes at all. And like mentioned in other comments, the effort of typing these notes is a limiting factor on the quality of my notes (too much time spent typing slows the troubleshooting iteration loop).

It goes without saying that typing notes, transcribing documents, and generally "stream of consciousness typing" is helped by a fast WPM rate.

But for coders, that's seldom the task we're doing. Hence the assertion "I spend more time thinking than typing".

It is either an objective fact, or something you experience, but it cannot be both. Having said it, have you actually measured how much time you spend typing, to claim a huge boost in productivity? Developers very often overstate the amount they type p.d.

I can imagine, that going from pecking on keyboard to 10 fingers is actually huge - it is just a bump disappearing. But going from 80 wpm to 160 should have diminishing returns, even more so going from 160 to 320 - here, the Pareto principle should kick in.

I was saying an "objective fact" for me, not globally. I was responding to the idea of "fetishizing" WPM when I'm saying, no, with 100% certainty, WPM is extremely beneficial to me with no grey area.

Also I did say in another comment 80 WPM would be where I'd put the barrier of not having to constantly break mental focus. BUT ALSO.. I'll take this a step further...

Have you ever gone from a 60hz monitor to 120?

Have you gone from non retina iphone to retina or remember that?

Have you gone from 32gb to 96gb in your computer and noticed things open THAT much faster?

Have you ever optimized something like the load speed of your terminal and removed 200ms from its boot time?

Now could you imagine ever going back after doing any of those things?

To me, thats what its like beyond 80. I can't imagine having to go back to 80 after I've felt 160. It's just THAT much more freeing when I'm really really deep in thought. quite literally I can type as fast as I can think, and it becomes truly seemless, like "programming in lisp" when the language gets out of the way (I dont program in lisp regularly, just seems like a good analogy)

Counterpoint: the best engineers I've worked with had beat up, old crappy laptops with low res screens.

I'm thinking of 2-3 guys I really admire, and they had this in common: when asked "but don't you need the latest Mac with a retina screen!?" they looked puzzled. Like, the common answer was, give or take: "yeah, I guess, if there's one to spare, but don't other people need it more? I do most of my thinking away from the screen anyway, and I run my stuff on a server".

The fetishization of hardware is yet another thing that puzzles me. Yeah, better hardware makes our lives easier and nobody will deny that, but (barring some obvious stuff like "this will take 1 hour to run vs 1 week") does it really impact how effective you are at completing tasks in your job? To some degree it does, but programmers tend to overemphasize it because it's easier to obsess about getting better hardware than about solving harder problems ;)

For me? Yes it does, and I'm not fetishizing hardware, etc. In my mind, it's very "this is the way it is"

I'm a single developer/entrepreneur who as put dozens of products to market single handedly, and a number of them have done really well (some getting over 10M/yr another getting much higher than that). Right now I'm managing 3 full time... and Some days I code upwards of 15+ hours a day when building.

So basically efficiency is important to me. I literally am doing the job of like 3-4 developers at once (I do all design, frontend, backend, data analysis, reporting, infrastructure, etc).

"yeah, I guess, if there's one to spare, but don't other people need it more? I do most of my thinking away from the screen anyway, and I run my stuff on a server"

This just sounds like a mopey slow answer, sorry. I'm not hating on what they're saying but I'm not going to intentionally make my life slower/worse because of some disjointed idea that doesn't make sense. "Someone else needs it" sounds like fake ... modesty or something. MOST of my time is spent thinking in the shower, in my sleep, or with a physical pencial/notebook in my hand where I architect things. That doesnt mean the hours upon hours .... 30,000+ hours at this point in my life, that I've been on the computer actually building that I'm not going to use the very best tools at my disposal.

When people constantly call nice things "fetishizing" it sounds to me they're just different kinds of thinkers, more like scientists or objective experience-driven, domain-knowledge heavy type programmers. I'm not like that, I'm more about pattern recognition when information is missing, and filling in the gaps and moving quickly/efficiently/elegantly, and design and aesthetics are extremely critical to me. Elegantly designed/efficient code is extremely important to me, just as much as an efficient workflow.

You could call it "being creative" or whatever you want, but those things are very important to me as they all feed into my mind as fuel... into this giant arc reactor of mental substrate, and I look through this kaleidescope connections and I refine refine refine go go go.

> This just sounds like a mopey slow answer, sorry. I'm not hating on what they're saying but I'm not going to intentionally make my life slower/worse because of some disjointed idea that doesn't make sense. "Someone else needs it" sounds like fake ... modesty or something.

Well, you'll have to take my word for it: these people I'm describing are brilliant and accomplished engineers who advanced lots of projects in their jobs, and taught me a lot. I saw what they did. I saw them troubleshoot hard engineering problems, and solve them. This is not hearsay, I saw them at work.

So I guess I'll follow the evidence.

I'm not questioning their skill or your observation, I believe you fully.

I also know just because someone is smart doesn't mean that all their ideas make sense in terms of efficiency. The smartest people I know are also generally the sloppiest, or have the most rigid unbending ideas that are not adaptable.

I'm not saying that's what you've seen of course, just wanted to explain that what I'm saying doesn't necessarily contradict what you're saying.