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I am curious to know how fast some of you on this forum can type. What is considered an average typing speed? As well as an extremely fast one. I would say 100 WPM is up there, taking into account that there is some accuracy involved :) I do not consider my self a very good typist because of how slow my fingers move, do employers base anything off of WPM typed? Maybe some sort of standard that the potential employee must meet before being hired, Thoughts.
No employer of software developers are going to judge you on WPM. Stats like that are only useful for people that transcribe text either from speech, like court reporters or personal assistants, or from other text perhaps when other forms of transcription are not available. That said, just simply because of the sheer amount of time that most programmers spend on a computer, we all typically have pretty good typing speed. When I transcribe text, I tend to type in the high 70s to low 80s; That's with perfect or near perfect punctuation and spelling. When I'm typing from my own thoughts, like right now for instance, I can approach 100 WPM, but I doubt regularly because it's always worth it to analyze your thoughts as your putting them out there.
TypingTest.com is a nice little test if you want to know your transcription speed. It's a good idea to do at least the two minutes and don't repeat the same ones over and over again as you'll just start to memorize them more or less.
Thanks ill give that a shot.... BTW I remember seeing your avatar about a year ago and was so fascinated by it that I made a Playstation Network Name called "DancinMilkCarton" :) incredible avatar hah
That's an extremely easy typing test. (Reminds me of online "intelligence tests".) I scored 126.
But when programming you spend more time thinking or debugging than typing.
EDIT: Oops! What was I thinking? I got 54, which is fast for me. (I was talking to my sister on the phone and asked her to do it. She got 126, but she's a good typist.)
Yep. If applying for a programming job and they focus on WPM run the other direction or apply for the head developer job lolQuote:
Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom
I can do 100 WPM when transcribing. When I am authoring it is somewhat less than that because the limiting factor is my thinking speed, not my typing speed.
I strike the keys faster when writing C++ than when writing in English. I measured all this stuff years ago with a cool little utility I forget the name of now. These days, it's really hard to measure my coding speed because I use so many accelerators and context-aware code generation.
I am a horrible touch typist despite knowing how. My results from the test linked in post #2 is an adjusted speed of 23 wpm. At least it's better than my last test. If you have ever thought to yourself, "I wonder why whiteflags posts so slowly," now you know.
91 wpm. 100% accuracy.
I do mostly touch typing with a few of my own "optimizations" (I developed those after I could do 100% standard touch typing).
I was actually curious about the transcription of text for most people... do you find that you transcribe letter by letter or would you say that you tend to cache into your memory familiar phrases and read ahead before your fingers actually get there? In other words, do you find that you transcribe text that you're comfortable spelling a lot faster than transcribing text in an unfamiliar language? I recently tried a couple of typing tests in languages that I don't speak fluently and found I drop a good 10 WPM trying to transcribe the text? Does that sound common?
As for the ease of the test I posted... it's not really meant to be a perfect judge of typing speed. I do believe that official typing tests that certain jobs may require you to take are usually 10+ minutes of transcription and they don't usually provide an adjusted WPM as your expected to have perfect transcription and fix all of your typos. That said, when I take tests like the one I provided, I fix all of my typos, anyway. In reality, I could probably improve my score by intentionally flubbing the "hard" words and pounding out as many of the easy ones as possible. This is why a genuine test expects 100% accuracy.
My sister does medical coding and she said in workplaces you tend to get used to repetition and then cache phrases, terms, etc into the mind.
Regardless of process it all boils down to the same exact reason:
muscle memory.
The term "muscle memory" drives me nuts. It's your brain remembering it, not your muscles -- it's just that the process has become an unconscious process, like breathing or putting one foot in front of the other while walking.
It should be called something like "cerebellar memory", since the part that learns the movements is your cerebellum (the "little brain" at the lower back part of the brain).
Cerebellum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
After nearly 20 years of Krav Maga and a few of the inferior "martial arts" I'm entirely too adjusted to calling it muscle memory to care or change.
Interesting. Did you learn that in the IDF or somewhere else?Quote:
Originally Posted by RoD
I'm American so no, the IDF is not where I learned it :p
I have studied KM under a few instructors since I have lived in a few different states. KM is my consistent training because I love it and nothing imo is as lean and mean. I also have a background in BJJ with nobody special and Filipino Kali which I actually learned from Dan Inosanto.
Have you noticed the image I use for my avatar? ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by RoD
I study PTK, but I'm a newbie. Any chance you're near Portland Oregon?
Last time I tested was in high school and I scored 95 to 100 WPM. The typing teacher tried like crazy to get me to use the preferred style and home-row based typing but after I beat her one on one....she let me stick with my method. I've slowed down some since then due to the recent heavy reliance on the mouse. I learned to type playing text adventure games and let me tell you when an orc is chasing after you with a big axe you learn to type pretty fast.
Closer to St. Louis, Missouri :)Quote:
Originally Posted by brewbuck
Shoot me a PM if you want, don't want to OT his thread too badly lol
I pretty much mastered typing playing MUD for that very reason. Take too long to type out a command or message, and you're dead when you press 'enter.'Quote:
Originally Posted by VirtualAce
Heh, as a programmer, you'd think you'd use a MUD client that allows you to make aliases and trigger macros.Quote:
Originally Posted by Matticus
That was years before I started my journey of programming, in those wonderful days of youth where I still had time to waste.Quote:
Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom
I might say the very same thing, however, it was actually MUD clients and IRC clients that got me interested in programming to begin with due to their built in programming capabilities. My first "programs" were simple IRC bots that responded to chat room based RPGs. In fact, I remember the first time I took pride in programming was when I got banned from a chat room RPG because I had made a "bot" that could either level or farm for me all night while I wasn't playing. Anyway, that's all off topic and I shouldn't say any more about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Matticus
EDIT: I will say one more thing... :) Oddly enough, as advanced as that had felt to program at the time, this all still happened before I initially signed up to this forum so that I could ask what while(1){ } was supposed to mean.
I guess wanting your "bot" to work forever rather than just for one night was the next step, heheh.Quote:
Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom