Isn't there another forum for this? It's one thing to discuss the firing of a google engineer, but discussing the morality of pro/anti gay doesn't really seem relevant to programming.

And all of you know Suzzer is trying to avoid politics!

So... what do y'all think about dem' pointers?

I prefer the more gender neutral “address”...

Anyone ever have someone on the team who doesn't know how to touch type? This senior engineer just joined our team and the person is supposed to have a decade worth of experience but yet doesn't know how to touch type. It pains me whenever I see that person start typing.

Hah, after I linked the blog post about interviewing I was reading a bunch of his other posts including: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008...ecret.html?m=1

Again, there's a lot of hyperbole there but I think his main point is true. Maybe even more so now.

I've worked with a few good engineers that weren't good typers but were ok and I found it annoying from time to time. Never worked with a good programmer who can't type at all.

I don't touch type. I'm pretty fast with 6 fingers, but typing has never been the thing that slows down my programming.

if the person is smart and a good programmer i wouldn't care, but it's pretty ****ing funny and i'd definitely give them constant **** about it.

Yea the person seems to know how to program I think. Touch typing is one thing, but this person is also really slow at typing.

I guess I shouldn't judge though.

Total garbage from start to finish imo.

I type with index and middle fingers only (plus thumb for spacebar and left/right pinkies for Shift/Alt/Ctrl). I scored 301 CPM/60 WPM on this test, with two mistakes over 60 words. That's slower than I am when I'm sitting here typing this, because my typing style requires me to know what I am about to type and the test is a string of nonsense words which I can't read and hold in mind.

Slow at typing is more of a concern, but mostly because it's a red flag for how much time he spends on computers and how late he came to programming. It depends how slow "slow" is, obviously a hunt-and-peck typist can't cut it as a programmer.

Favourite part of that blog post jj posted:

I think "lolololol" about covers all that.

that is impressive and i type only slightly faster as an (albeit slow) touch typist.

that said, you're a bizarre freak of nature and an abomination against god.

607/121 on my laptop keyboard with a busted L key (the cap is missing so every L slows me down a little)

mother of god

Chris, I work remote and 'talk' a lot over slack. It's absolutely true that the people that type slower (like by a lot) don't participate in discussions nearly as much as other people.

It's also true that they don't make their points as well as people that type faster.

Again, there's some hyperbole in there but his point is correct.

I type pretty weird. I can touch type, in the sense that I don't look at the keyboard at all, but I don't like have the correct style with my fingers on the home key etc.

When I was about 20, I had a pretty severe injury and resultant surgery to my right hand. My right arm was immobilized in a cast for quite a while. I could use a mouse and I could use the index finger of my right hand. So, I type with my left hand and 1-2 fingers from my right. My left is actually fairly typical for a touch typist except it strays a little further to the right.

I haven't taken a typing test in a long time, but I type as fast as anyone I know.

I actually think if you spend most of your time typing as a programmer, you're probably doing it wrong.

Oh, and kind of funny, to me anyway, is that a few months ago I broke my left collarbone so my left arm was in a sling for several weeks. My wife asked if I was going to be typing with only index fingers at the end of that. I actually did program completely right handed for about 10 days. It was pretty frustrating.

I would buy that, but does it really matter? If the issue is really important, there should be a voice call. If it's not, does it matter if they contribute less? If they have something actually important to say, they'll say it.

That's my problem with the post, that most of the accusations he levels at non touch typists either don't matter much or are flat out misguided. Whenever I see someone complain that other programmers don't comment code enough, I pretty much ignore everything else they have to say. Good code should usually only need sparse commenting, and people that insist on heavy commenting are the enemies of productivity and maintainability. The bit about them not formatting code also made me lol. Does this guy use an IDE? I mean the post is 2008, so maybe that has something to do with it, but it reads like it's from 1998.

Like if I could type at 120 WPM rather than 65 WPM or whatever I do in practice, that would be a useful skill, conceded. I think it's way down the list of useful study I could do underneath just about everything else. Also, I have 30-odd years of near-daily repetition of typing the way I type, so I think his airy assertion that I am going to learn a different way of doing things in a few dozen hours (unsupported by any actual evidence that this is the case) is likely to be wildly wrong.

Edit: While it's a general human cognitive bias, programmers are the absolute worst for insisting that a skill they already know how to do is easy and could be picked up in a few hours.

Yes. Fundamentally we're talking about being able to communicate - anything that restricts your ability to communicate with your coworkers definitely matters.

We only have a real meeting if there is something useful to discuss in person - often we can reach consensus w/o one. But sure, major issues are generally discussed over a larger length of time and everybody can contribute.

But there are other situations where its super duper important.

We run outages from slack. Often there is a meeting/call as well, but slack is often the center stage. People that can't type fast can't contribute as much in these situations. There's also lots of day-to-day decisions that get made by the people that 'show up'.

He's actually not arguing for heavy commenting. Nor do I think that he is explicitly talking about using language comments (which still have an important place). People that type slowly are less likely to leave comments AND less likely to refactor their code to make it readable and understandable.


There's still important formatting you should do even with an IDE. But, uh, sure. It's probably not that important for many people/languages. (And note that he was talking about "the ones who essentially type with their elbows")

As a meta point - I'll point out once again that people that just go "LOL that blog was terrible!!!!" are doing themselves a great disservice. Its clear from your response here that you could have learned something from it.

And an attitude like "Whenever I see someone complain that other programmers don't comment code enough, I pretty much ignore everything else they have to say" is also a pretty big disservice. Nobody in life is perfect, so if you ignore everything from someone that says something wrong to you... well, that's tough.

65 wpm is well beyond the point where it matters. i'd say the negative effects apply to people who type like 35 wpm. i didn't read the article -- which was verbose in the profligate manner of a man able to spew words faster than is good for him :P -- does he name a speed?

very, very true

Pretty much same here with fingers and same typing speed.

One weird thing I really suck at is typing if I can't see the screen. I find it extremely hard to type blind and I make constant typos. I hate those browser/pdf/etc search boxes that pop up way off in the distance somewhere. I always find some way to screw up a simple 5-character search term.

Yeah, I don't have an intuitve sense of how fast 60 wpm is. But if you don't find the things he's talking about applying to you, then it probably doesn't apply. That's fine.

Sergei Brin did say ""Sometimes, I use it as a night-time aid," about Yegge's rants... so...