Do programmers have to have a high WPM ? / Mine is 53 WPM, what is yours ?

This was one of the best investments I made during covid lockdown. I reach an average of ~45 WPM. But while you're are coding, you are not always peaking. Hell you are not even typing enough at times. But it is important to type without looking at the keyboard. It is a basic skill which is overlooked at times.

For anyone who doesn't know, use keybr.com/ or monkeytype.com/ and start practicing. Your future self will appreciate it.

My Top WPM is 70. But I actually want it to be better than that. But I stopped seeing the effect on my code. I spend most time thinking about what to type than actually typing.

Having a high WPM is cool though. I can impress your friends and they'll think I'm a pro😂😂

Advancing with this new keyboard 😄 :

Shortcut VSCode is important.

About eighty words per minute.

I have never been a particularly fast typist either. I'm only a little better, at 78 WPM, according typingtest.com. Also it made me type about an interesting fact: there are only two escalators in the US state of Wyoming. Wow!

Like most people my age (I think?) I never learned to type correctly, but developed a fast-enough guerilla typing style just by using computers a lot. Some time I'd like to try to learn to type better.

interesting, i tried on monkeytype for the first time and mine was 68 WPM

55 WPM just me, but around 200 with my text expansions while coding!

interesting question but i would side on 'no'

if we coded at the same speed we typed or spoke then i think it'd be relevant. but even the snappiest of typers would sit there mulling over a function block for far longer than it took to actually type it out.

maybe its more that employers/peers would look at slow typing as an indication that you're not familiar with a keyboard?

... just to pick a bit of a wild example to make my argument. our robo-boy Hawking wasnt the quickest of typers either, but there he was, unfolding the universe for us with his chin <3

I just took monkeytype and got my high score because I was trying so hard.

Mine best is 120.
But it depends what I'm typing

WPM is like LoC: very poor measure.

I try to improve my WPM because it has the side effect of knowing my keyboard like the bottom of my pocket. I have a split keyboard with multiple layers: I want to test my layout as much as possible, tweak it where I see the weaknesses and make the most used keys highly available.

The goal to all of this getting my typing out of the way of my thinking. I want to have ideas and let my hands rely on muscle memory.

I just did a quick test and scored 101. I could probably do better, but there were grammatical errors in the test that threw me off.

Anyway, I doubt typing speed matters too much with programming. For one thing, typing quickly is more about writing full sentences, while programming is very—stylized. That is, I doubt many people can quickly type block-structured text, and some of the key combinations are a bit gnarly, especially < and >.

And as others have said, and I definitely agree with, you spend much more time thinking about the right thing to type than you do typing it.

I can average about 130-140 wpm. I can hit 160+ if I'm concentrating. I do not hit that at all when coding. Does it help? Yes it helps, I can code relatively fast if I know exactly what I want the next 30 lines of code to be, but when is that ever the case? It is not something you "have to have". The difference in WPM is not going to improve your code quality which ultimately is the most important aspect. I've also been through many jobs and I've only come across one that required a minimum wpm, and it was pretty low like 35 wpm or something.

Probably abysmally low when coding due to thinking but I also try to substitute a majority of my typing with snippets so I'm focusing on solving problems instead of writing the solution.