16 ms·

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

gowld 5y ago
You type a lot more than 0.5% of the time.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  I'm typing even less these days with tools like copilot.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    For some reason I don’t like any of this automation tools. I find VSCode unbearable even without copilot. Too many things happen when I type. I prefer linting and that’s about all I want to write my code peacefully. I use vim in iTerm and it’s all I ever need. Jump off to Pycharm to debug if needed.
    - bastardoperator 5y ago
      I use vim quite a bit too, just sayin... https://github.com/github/copilot.vim https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        Oh boy..., I guess there are people who find this useful. I respect "To each their own" and "You do you". I also like using Sublime Text with vim keymap. I prefer the low latency of editors over features of big IDEs. Sometimes, I do use PyCharm or CLion for debugging since that experience in vim sucks. GDB is terrible in CLI.
    - genidoi 5y ago
      About 3-5% of the time, copilot poops out an unexpectedly clever code block that makes it worth it to me, if nothing else but for the surprise factor. For the remaining 95%… I’ve configured it to delay doing anything until 10000ms passes so it doesn’t get in the way
- watwut 5y ago
  Yes, but typing speed is still not too important.
  - stickydink 5y ago
    There is some threshold where it absolutely impacts productivity. If you haven't seen this in action, you're lucky, I've ran into more than one Engineer who is otherwise very smart but somehow never learned to type.
    - cestith 5y ago
      I'd say that threshold is closer to 40 wpm than 160 wpm.
    - jjice 5y ago
      For sure. If you're a hunt-and-peck typer, it makes meetings where we're waiting for someone to finish typing unbearable. If you're even somewhat competent at typing, then I don't think it's a big pain point.
  - angio 5y ago
    I'm glad I'm a fast typer because I can spend less time replying to pointless emails.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  I also spend less than 15% of my time drinking coffee.
- romwell 5y ago
  It's a trade-off between spending some time thinking about what should be written, and then typing a little - or spending all the time typing, typing, typing, and rewriting. I don't think I've ever been in a job where I was limited by typing speed.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    In my experience, typing early and rapidly iterating and modifying, i.e. thinking on the page, is FAR more effective than spending tons of time in your own head trying to solve the problem elegantly before you ever type anything. The exception to this might be spending time thinking about the very high level structure you want, since the initial structure you start with can lock you into pattern of trying to solve the problem that might not be the most effective.
  - jldugger 5y ago
    Then you should definitely consider switching keyboard layouts to reduce RSI. I did, last week. Going from 80wpm to 30 wpm is definitely a job impediment (in the short term). So many things are keyboard driven: - communicating with peers over slack - writing code / git commands - writing email, comments in HN, documentation, etc. - taking notes in meetings - all the browser shortcuts - all the CLI readline shortcuts
    - romwell 5y ago
      I never thought about RSI, but also I've started having pain/weakness in my right hand last month (that, thankfully, has mostly gone away). The doc said it was tendenitis. I feel like excessive swipe-typing with my thumb may have contributed more than typing to that; but I also play keyboards and it was scary for a second to have that affected. I got myself a vertical mouse; will consider using another layout (which one do you use?). I do type at 75-80WPM (including time to fixe typos), can that really cause RSI? I don't know if I'll be able to pull off even 20wpm with another layout, but looks like it's the next step. Thanks for suggesting it!
    - shard 5y ago
      Yes. I've love to be able to type fast enough to take notes so that I don't have to try to read my chicken scratch handwriting and figure out what the hell I was trying to write, especially when referring to notes where I don't have any recollection of what the contents were.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Not an amount of time where typing more efficiently is going to matter. Once you hit intermediate competency it stops mattering.
dmux 5y ago
I'm having difficulties finding the source right now, but I remember reading a story about a sysadmin that was berated for his typing speed and the story ended with him replying "I don't get paid to type code fast, I get paid to press enter very, very slowly."
- Sosh101 5y ago
  Haha brilliant.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  playing the devil's advocate, typing speed is important for these reasons: 1. It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process, close to 90% of the time even when coding is not actively typing, but when typing is subconscious and fast it removes the potential of where it interrupts the thinking process. 2. While this has no bearing on individual case (It would be Bayesian, some people consider that to be heretic), but a software engineer who does not type well have a greater chance of having had less practice.
  - chromanoid 5y ago
    Autocomplete makes programming very different from normal typing. I don't need to type fast, I use my keyboard to trigger lists of options that I pick from. Modern programming is a contemplative interaction with the IDE/language server, normal typing should only come into play when you write comments.
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      Autocomplete is just a very small subset of modal editing paradigm, the entire editing process, both typing and key shortcuts (i.e. picking options) should be treated as the same.
      - chromanoid 5y ago
        But in this case WPM or similar are completely useless measures. With the right tooling one can pump out an extreme amount of code in a few minutes. It totally depends on the programming language and the available tooling, templates etc. You don't need quick fingers for programming. Depending on the verbosity of the programming language and if it is statically typed you are much faster in pumping out characters.
kraftman 5y ago
your missing replying on hacker news, chatting on slack, chatting on whatever othe rchat program you use, etc.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  That's the real use case here, get your comments out faster on hacker news than everyone else!
  - kristjansson 5y ago
    Where else does one learn to _really_ type quickly besides hurrying messages into a game chat?
steelstraw 5y ago
I wonder how much of Carmack's time is spent typing. It'd be fascinating to get an idea of that.
etrautmann 5y ago
Even if you're not wrong, this is a disappointing attitude. There are so many reasons to want to improve user interfaces - reducing RSI, reducing error rates, increasing speed, etc. I love seeing new designs where people are trying to improve the state of the art even if I don't plan to use this immediately .
neysofu 5y ago
Most of the advantage in alternative layouts is improved comfort and less injury-prone finger movements. Faster typing speed is basically a nice side effect.
lmilcin 5y ago
You forgot typing documentation, emails and chatting on Slack. Also, you might be underestimating how dumb it looks to both technical and non-technical people when a highly paid engineer can barely type. Not that I've seen many who type slowly, probably because that's something you just pick up after decades of work.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
And most emacs users write programs that type repetitive patterns for them anyway
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0kl 5y ago
I think things like this are not “everyone must use this new better way of typing,” but more “hey there may be a better way of doing this task.” I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn’t be, that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds personally… From another perspective: sure you might speed up only 0.5% of your workday - but how is that a bad thing? Repetitive stress injuries aside, even if you only spend an hour a week typing (I suspect it’s honestly more) then if you end up increasing your typing speed by double you’re still saving yourself 25 hours a year. Assuming my a career of 35 years that’s 875 hours and you increase your time fighting imposter syndrome by 0.25%. Scale up as appropriate for how much time you actually spend typing.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Medical transcriptionists once used a specialized keyboard to quickly describe spoken terminology. "Shorthand" has existed for a while and I imagine is a dying art at this point [1]. I think most cases where you needed actual really fast typing were covered long ago and the number of careers or situations where a person needed it have been declining for a long time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand
  - 0kl 5y ago
    My point is more of it being not a bad thing to improve on. Most of the cases where you needed actual really fast travel have been covered for a long time and the number of careers or situations where a person need to travel fast have been declining for a long time, but I think we can all agree faster travel times are better. Side note: stenography and chorded words with something like Plover (similar to the above) is where really fast typing usually comes into play for. I have not looked into any of the above because the pain of changing my habits hasn’t been worth the benefits to me yet. I’ve considered it when I had to do interview transcripts, but ultimately I didn’t want to make the investment. I hope future generations are able to learn on something more designed for contemporary use than QWERTY and classic keyboards - I know my wrists have thanked me for moving to a split keyboard for the ergonomics alone.
therealdrag0 5y ago
The amount of time I spend typing in Slack alone is FAR greater then 0.5%, plus writing docs, tickets, PRs, writing code, etc.
908B64B197 5y ago
> and 0.5% actual typing I wonder how often Donald Knuth types. And he is arguably among the 5 best coders in the world.
wnolens 5y ago
An old very experienced co-worker once said, "code is written once but read a thousand times". Most of the old wizards I worked with hunted and pecked, looking down constantly.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  I had the opportunity to work with a guy who studied CS back in the day when punch cards were still used. Sadly he left into well deserved retirement a few years later. He typed slowly, not hunt&peck, but really slow compared to the other engineers. Didn't matter. The guy was a wizard. Ever seen someone implement radix sort in assembly or debugging a microservice using nothing but nc and echo? Without looking up ANYTHING either in a book or online? That kind of guy. Working with him, I sometimes felt like Mickey Mouse in that scene of "Fantasia: The Sorcerers Apprentice", when the Master came back, surveying the flood, and fixing everyting in seconds just by waving his hands imperiously :D
Too 5y ago
Doesn’t this argument go both ways? Given you have so little time left for actual coding, you should be squeezing every last bit out of it. Depending of course if your meetings are necessary discussions, or just pointless constraints.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  The argument isn't that there is so little time to type code, but that typing code requires so little time compared to everything else.
bardan 5y ago
The act of coding itself is also not a constant flow of characters from fingers to screen. You stop to take a moment, go back, correct something, next line, pause to think, type out a line etc. I have never used a device like this but I'm pretty sure I type at roughly the speed I think, at least when I'm writing programs. General note taking, eg. jotting down ideas, might be different, where I do find myself thinking faster than I type.
wanderer2323 5y ago
Holy wow, you’re missing a lot of quality design doc time in this breakdown

gowld 5y ago

You type a lot more than 0.5% of the time.

bastardoperator 5y ago
I'm typing even less these days with tools like copilot.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  For some reason I don’t like any of this automation tools. I find VSCode unbearable even without copilot. Too many things happen when I type. I prefer linting and that’s about all I want to write my code peacefully. I use vim in iTerm and it’s all I ever need. Jump off to Pycharm to debug if needed.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    I use vim quite a bit too, just sayin... https://github.com/github/copilot.vim https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      Oh boy..., I guess there are people who find this useful. I respect "To each their own" and "You do you". I also like using Sublime Text with vim keymap. I prefer the low latency of editors over features of big IDEs. Sometimes, I do use PyCharm or CLion for debugging since that experience in vim sucks. GDB is terrible in CLI.
  - genidoi 5y ago
    About 3-5% of the time, copilot poops out an unexpectedly clever code block that makes it worth it to me, if nothing else but for the surprise factor. For the remaining 95%… I’ve configured it to delay doing anything until 10000ms passes so it doesn’t get in the way
watwut 5y ago
Yes, but typing speed is still not too important.
- stickydink 5y ago
  There is some threshold where it absolutely impacts productivity. If you haven't seen this in action, you're lucky, I've ran into more than one Engineer who is otherwise very smart but somehow never learned to type.
  - cestith 5y ago
    I'd say that threshold is closer to 40 wpm than 160 wpm.
  - jjice 5y ago
    For sure. If you're a hunt-and-peck typer, it makes meetings where we're waiting for someone to finish typing unbearable. If you're even somewhat competent at typing, then I don't think it's a big pain point.
- angio 5y ago
  I'm glad I'm a fast typer because I can spend less time replying to pointless emails.
usrbinbash 5y ago
I also spend less than 15% of my time drinking coffee.
romwell 5y ago
It's a trade-off between spending some time thinking about what should be written, and then typing a little - or spending all the time typing, typing, typing, and rewriting. I don't think I've ever been in a job where I was limited by typing speed.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  In my experience, typing early and rapidly iterating and modifying, i.e. thinking on the page, is FAR more effective than spending tons of time in your own head trying to solve the problem elegantly before you ever type anything. The exception to this might be spending time thinking about the very high level structure you want, since the initial structure you start with can lock you into pattern of trying to solve the problem that might not be the most effective.
- jldugger 5y ago
  Then you should definitely consider switching keyboard layouts to reduce RSI. I did, last week. Going from 80wpm to 30 wpm is definitely a job impediment (in the short term). So many things are keyboard driven: - communicating with peers over slack - writing code / git commands - writing email, comments in HN, documentation, etc. - taking notes in meetings - all the browser shortcuts - all the CLI readline shortcuts
  - romwell 5y ago
    I never thought about RSI, but also I've started having pain/weakness in my right hand last month (that, thankfully, has mostly gone away). The doc said it was tendenitis. I feel like excessive swipe-typing with my thumb may have contributed more than typing to that; but I also play keyboards and it was scary for a second to have that affected. I got myself a vertical mouse; will consider using another layout (which one do you use?). I do type at 75-80WPM (including time to fixe typos), can that really cause RSI? I don't know if I'll be able to pull off even 20wpm with another layout, but looks like it's the next step. Thanks for suggesting it!
  - shard 5y ago
    Yes. I've love to be able to type fast enough to take notes so that I don't have to try to read my chicken scratch handwriting and figure out what the hell I was trying to write, especially when referring to notes where I don't have any recollection of what the contents were.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
Not an amount of time where typing more efficiently is going to matter. Once you hit intermediate competency it stops mattering.

dmux 5y ago

I'm having difficulties finding the source right now, but I remember reading a story about a sysadmin that was berated for his typing speed and the story ended with him replying "I don't get paid to type code fast, I get paid to press enter very, very slowly."

Sosh101 5y ago
Haha brilliant.
Aperocky 5y ago
playing the devil's advocate, typing speed is important for these reasons: 1. It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process, close to 90% of the time even when coding is not actively typing, but when typing is subconscious and fast it removes the potential of where it interrupts the thinking process. 2. While this has no bearing on individual case (It would be Bayesian, some people consider that to be heretic), but a software engineer who does not type well have a greater chance of having had less practice.
- chromanoid 5y ago
  Autocomplete makes programming very different from normal typing. I don't need to type fast, I use my keyboard to trigger lists of options that I pick from. Modern programming is a contemplative interaction with the IDE/language server, normal typing should only come into play when you write comments.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    Autocomplete is just a very small subset of modal editing paradigm, the entire editing process, both typing and key shortcuts (i.e. picking options) should be treated as the same.
    - chromanoid 5y ago
      But in this case WPM or similar are completely useless measures. With the right tooling one can pump out an extreme amount of code in a few minutes. It totally depends on the programming language and the available tooling, templates etc. You don't need quick fingers for programming. Depending on the verbosity of the programming language and if it is statically typed you are much faster in pumping out characters.

kraftman 5y ago

your missing replying on hacker news, chatting on slack, chatting on whatever othe rchat program you use, etc.

dr_orpheus 5y ago
That's the real use case here, get your comments out faster on hacker news than everyone else!
- kristjansson 5y ago
  Where else does one learn to _really_ type quickly besides hurrying messages into a game chat?

steelstraw 5y ago

I wonder how much of Carmack's time is spent typing. It'd be fascinating to get an idea of that.

etrautmann 5y ago

Even if you're not wrong, this is a disappointing attitude. There are so many reasons to want to improve user interfaces - reducing RSI, reducing error rates, increasing speed, etc. I love seeing new designs where people are trying to improve the state of the art even if I don't plan to use this immediately .

neysofu 5y ago

Most of the advantage in alternative layouts is improved comfort and less injury-prone finger movements. Faster typing speed is basically a nice side effect.

lmilcin 5y ago

You forgot typing documentation, emails and chatting on Slack. Also, you might be underestimating how dumb it looks to both technical and non-technical people when a highly paid engineer can barely type. Not that I've seen many who type slowly, probably because that's something you just pick up after decades of work.

CyberRabbi 5y ago

And most emacs users write programs that type repetitive patterns for them anyway

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

0kl 5y ago

I think things like this are not “everyone must use this new better way of typing,” but more “hey there may be a better way of doing this task.” I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn’t be, that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds personally… From another perspective: sure you might speed up only 0.5% of your workday - but how is that a bad thing? Repetitive stress injuries aside, even if you only spend an hour a week typing (I suspect it’s honestly more) then if you end up increasing your typing speed by double you’re still saving yourself 25 hours a year. Assuming my a career of 35 years that’s 875 hours and you increase your time fighting imposter syndrome by 0.25%. Scale up as appropriate for how much time you actually spend typing.

joe_the_user 5y ago
Medical transcriptionists once used a specialized keyboard to quickly describe spoken terminology. "Shorthand" has existed for a while and I imagine is a dying art at this point [1]. I think most cases where you needed actual really fast typing were covered long ago and the number of careers or situations where a person needed it have been declining for a long time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand
- 0kl 5y ago
  My point is more of it being not a bad thing to improve on. Most of the cases where you needed actual really fast travel have been covered for a long time and the number of careers or situations where a person need to travel fast have been declining for a long time, but I think we can all agree faster travel times are better. Side note: stenography and chorded words with something like Plover (similar to the above) is where really fast typing usually comes into play for. I have not looked into any of the above because the pain of changing my habits hasn’t been worth the benefits to me yet. I’ve considered it when I had to do interview transcripts, but ultimately I didn’t want to make the investment. I hope future generations are able to learn on something more designed for contemporary use than QWERTY and classic keyboards - I know my wrists have thanked me for moving to a split keyboard for the ergonomics alone.

therealdrag0 5y ago

The amount of time I spend typing in Slack alone is FAR greater then 0.5%, plus writing docs, tickets, PRs, writing code, etc.

908B64B197 5y ago

> and 0.5% actual typing I wonder how often Donald Knuth types. And he is arguably among the 5 best coders in the world.

wnolens 5y ago

An old very experienced co-worker once said, "code is written once but read a thousand times". Most of the old wizards I worked with hunted and pecked, looking down constantly.

usrbinbash 5y ago
I had the opportunity to work with a guy who studied CS back in the day when punch cards were still used. Sadly he left into well deserved retirement a few years later. He typed slowly, not hunt&peck, but really slow compared to the other engineers. Didn't matter. The guy was a wizard. Ever seen someone implement radix sort in assembly or debugging a microservice using nothing but nc and echo? Without looking up ANYTHING either in a book or online? That kind of guy. Working with him, I sometimes felt like Mickey Mouse in that scene of "Fantasia: The Sorcerers Apprentice", when the Master came back, surveying the flood, and fixing everyting in seconds just by waving his hands imperiously :D

Too 5y ago

Doesn’t this argument go both ways? Given you have so little time left for actual coding, you should be squeezing every last bit out of it. Depending of course if your meetings are necessary discussions, or just pointless constraints.

usrbinbash 5y ago
The argument isn't that there is so little time to type code, but that typing code requires so little time compared to everything else.

bardan 5y ago

The act of coding itself is also not a constant flow of characters from fingers to screen. You stop to take a moment, go back, correct something, next line, pause to think, type out a line etc. I have never used a device like this but I'm pretty sure I type at roughly the speed I think, at least when I'm writing programs. General note taking, eg. jotting down ideas, might be different, where I do find myself thinking faster than I type.

wanderer2323 5y ago

Holy wow, you’re missing a lot of quality design doc time in this breakdown