Keyboard input currently is the most common and efficient method to create text - dictation, handwriting recognition, and mind-to-text interfaces are still in t

Keyboard input currently is the most common and efficient method to create text - dictation, handwriting recognition, and mind-to-text interfaces are still in their infancy. Faster text input is a must for anyone involved in software development, there's no question about it. We, software engineers constantly share our ideas, our thoughts and hypotheses and the medium for that exchange 99% of the time is text - be that plain English, programming or any other natural language. Anyone who is incredibly slow with the process would be a detriment - a slow typist is unlikely to write good, useful git commit messages; they are less likely to spend time to write coherent, descriptive Pull-Request descriptions or share convincing architectural-change proposals. Just think about it - the average programmer over their professional lifetime writes the equivalent of 15-20 "War and Peace" books. "War and Peace" is approximately half a million words or 3.2 million characters. Assuming an average of 50 characters per line, a programmer writing 1 million lines would produce about 50 million characters. It took Leo Tolstoy around six years to finish his novel. Programmers often have to create projects twice as big in the matter of months. On the other hand - some may argue that over-prolific, fast typists sometimes write watered-down, lengthy texts that are painfully difficult to read and they add little value beyond just increasing the entropy. Writing well is a skill, and a faster typist is most likely to achieve this mastery quicker than a slow typist. Whenever I need to make hiring decisions I try to find the candidate's footprint - code, comments, blog posts, etc. You can tell a lot by simply skimming through what they wrote - whether it's code or plain text. Good programmers rarely are slow typists.