Should touch typing be a required skill for software engineering jobs?

Steve Yegge had a rant about this some 16 years ago. https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtie...

> Here's the industry's dirty secret: Programmers who don't touch-type fit a profile. ... The profile is this: non-touch-typists have to make sacrifices in order to sustain their productivity.

Jeff Atwood commentary at https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programme... .

102 HN comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300920 (plus a scattering of comments in the 9 other postings).

315 Reddit comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/70sqr/programm... .

I am a proficient touch typist myself by which code and vi placement fidgets flow endlessly from self guiding fingers. I have long passwords my fingers know and my brain does not.

An early intellectual mentor I had growing up, who was the hardest of hard core C developers, was a hunt and peck typist. Didn't seem to inconvenience him a bit.

I shouldn't think so. I've been touch typing since I was quite young, and I can type more quickly than most people do, but I don't believe that this makes me more productive: I spend far more time reading and thinking than I ever do writing, and I think this is true for most people.

(I did have one coworker, years ago, for whom this did not seem to be true: he routinely cranked out the largest volumes of code I've ever seen, by an order of magnitude - but his work was as notable for its sloppy repetition, bugginess, poor spelling, and total lack of abstraction as for its largeness. I think the team might have been more productive as a whole if he had been forced not to touch-type, perhaps by tying one of his hands behind his back while he worked.)

I can’t touch type. I spend more time thinking than I do typing. (Plus, I am usually also thinking while I type.)

Why do you say it is difficult to imagine being productive without this skill?

If typing speed is your bottleneck you're probably about to be replaced by an LLM anyways

I've touch typed since high school (on loud typewriters) and took up Emacs around 1989, but I think people are now less often generating complete chunks of code from scratch and more often refactoring existing code using awkward keybinds that didn't exist when they learned (or should have).

I don’t think so. I can touch-type but I have worked with many excellent programmers who can’t. Consider Stephen Hawking as an extreme example. Productive?

Since we don’t have a way to measure “being productive” in an objective or meaningful way you just assume without evidence that inability to touch-type decreases productivity. Programming requires typing but only incidentally — the real work happens in the brain, not in the fingers.

I’d concentrate on requiring ability to solve problems in code first, and then ability to program. Typing falls much lower on the list of desired skills. Too many programmers can’t even program effectively.

I don't see why. Almost none of the devs I know can touch type, and it doesn't seem to affect them. At least, they aren't any less effective at their jobs than those who can.

I can't really touch type. I have been a successful dev in finance (plus serial start-up founder) and retired early, and I am now doing a PhD.

IMHO touch typing is clearly not essential.

One reason I can't is because I spent a fair amount of time doing sysadmin and user support for multinationals, using lots of different keyboards with US / UK / other layouts. I simply didn't have the luxury of a fixed layout to get fast against.

And sysadmin / dev success is simply not measured in WPM.

> Should touch typing be a required skill for software engineering jobs?

No.

> It's hard to imagine a computer programmer being productive without this essential life skill.

To the extent this is not a failure of imagination, then, the problem is solved by requiring programmers to be productive.

Note that this also deals with the possibility that your impression is a failure of imagination.

Absolutely.