Do programmers required to be fast typist?

Why do you need to be fast typist?

To be fast typist isn’t necessary, but it wouldn’t hurt to be able to type “naturally” using all your fingers, without needing to hunt and peck, as needing to find characters on the keyboard can be distracting and may interrupt your train of thoughts. (Programming is all about thinking logic and how to translate you thought in to machine languages). Do you really want to waste time and brainpower looking for keys rather than letting your fingers move to the keys automatically?

More productivity on works

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.”  - Abraham Lincoln

You’ll have to spend some number of hours practicing and you’ll have a few weeks or even months of lowered productivity, but after an uncomfortable and hard time early period you’ll be benefits for the rest of your life. It will make your life easier permanently.

Once you learn to touch type, you will find that your code will move from your brain to the screen much faster. You won’t have to think about where your fingers are or move your hands or eyes around.

Fast typing is not necessary per se, but it is an advantage

Through a year in programming with my colleague. I heard the story they often told “Why do I need to typing faster or use all the fingers when I’ve already have Auto Complete in my IDE? (Typing few keyword and press Tab, done. That’s it.)”.

Is that really you just programming for the rest of your life without typing anything else, like write the long document, the report, response the emails, or chatting with customer to explain something in urgent situation like software assistant (Do you really want people other side wait for long response from you?). Or could be one day you write the blogs :). I know the habit is really difficult to change, but just set aside a few minutes a day to practice, in the long run, you will be benefits a lot

Final thought

That’s the crucial skill for programmers. It’s not necessary, it’s a skill you should acquire for your sake in the long term. For early periods as a developer, programming slow my typing speed down on special characters ({} . $this->, $, _/), but through the practice every day, I see it bring much benefits, not just speed typing on programming, but also chatting with other customers, write document and other works.

Source: MasteringTyping.com