I have had a few clients recently who expressed an interest in becoming computer programmers. They have presented with a wide variety of typing skills. Some just hunt and peck at 15-20 words per minute. Others touch type properly. So my questions are:
Thanks in advance.
With intelisense these days typing speed is not really an issue. I have secretaries that can type at twice times the speed I can. Yet I wouldn’t trust them to programme an excel spreadsheet. Let alone use them as coders.
I would be probably wouldn’t even list typing speed on my CV. I would be suspicious of anyone who could type phenomenally fast. Fast typing rates come from spending a lot of time copying in other peoples work.
For reference I touch type. I can touch type with one or two hands. My typing speed on straight copying is around 40 WPM. In practice when writing code or technical documentation I never get anywhere near that speed. The bottle neck is figuring out what to write, not writing it.
If typing was the bottleneck, then it would be relevant. Most of my time spent coding is staring at it, wondering why the hell it isn’t work.
Yeah, what’s your stare rate?
I would like to think I can get to at least ten to twelve oh shits per hour on a good day. It’s probably three or four an hour average.
My stare rate is low. Need to work on it. But my pacing rate is world class.
If you want to test your wpm
When I’m typing in a chat with someone and my concern for typos is minimal, I type with ~120 wpm and close-but-not-quite 100% accuracy. When I’m typing and I’m concerned about typos my type+read combination dips to about 90wpm. When I’m coding I’m probably down to <40 with code being blocks of broken grammar. But when you use lots of functions and modular coding, small calls become huge time savers.
I think I’d only type quickly while coding if I was typing up some dialogue scripts.
My speed and technique are roughly the same as they’ve always been. I never bothered learning to find the home row before I started typing, I simply placed my palms below the Windows keys and started typing. Typing fast was more important in the past when I used languages that were closer in syntax to English (ie BASIC), but now IntelliSense plays the bigger role.
84 wpm (420 chars per minute) with 95% accuracy. Probably can go faster if I relax, zone out and get myself proper keyboard.
Touch-type.
Above 120 characters per minute, I’d say. You definitely should be able to type without looking at keyboard, though.
It was said that average programmer produces 500 lines of code per day, and as far as I know it is quite close to the truth.
You’ll spend most of the time thinking and hunting bugs, not typing.
On other hand, if you communicate with people via email, typing skills will help a lot.
Really, because according to The Mythical Man-Month, it’s 10 LOC per day.
–Eric
using Universe;
public class World
{
}
Also lines of code written is irrelevant and typing speed is irrelevant to being a good programmer imo. A starter can easily toss out 1000 lines of code and type at a fast pace. The professionals that I’ve worked with have a slower typing pace than me but know more about what they’re doing than me and have been doing for longer than I’ve been alive in most cases.
@Ryiah I love how the WPM bar is not large enough for your score!
That number is too low. 10 LOC per day might happen if you’re doing maintenance work and project is not being improved in any way, but aside from that I think it is improbably low.
Maybe I should start using brackets on the next line to make my LPD look better.