I am frequently amazed to see professional software developers with years of experience in the field, who only type using their two index fingers. You probably do not need to type 120 WPM to be an amazing programmer, but typing without looking at the keyboard is absolutely essential.
This probably matters a lot less than younger people think. If you grew up touch-typing you got used to being able to put data in as fast (or almost as fast) as you could think it. If the input rate is slowed down, you feel like you're going to lose thoughts before they get captured.
Folks who did not grow up touch typing, though, simply learned to construct a longer-lasting mental model, which they can then write out however slowly. Think of it as a bigger buffer. In rare cases it can become enormous, and people write entire novels in their head before ever putting ink on paper (famous example: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", which was written at a rate of about one word every 2 minutes).
Or, they learned to create and capture design decisions in higher-density media (like diagrams or pseudocode), which, again, can then be typed in more slowly.
It's probably much better to judge developers by the quality of their output than how fast they type--especially since most software spends way longer in production and maintenance than it does being developed.
Having a slow typing speed still means that one spends a lot of time typing, rather than doing other things, even if one can still accomplish the same mental processes without having to record it "live".
Do you really type at full speed all the time though? Most of my time is spent thinking, and when I do type something it tends to get pipelined with more thinking. Typing faster wouldn't help much.
In fact, I'd wager that if someone is typing constantly at 100+ wpm they're probably writing bad code. Or very simple code, I guess. Or they're just transcribing UML or whatever, but nobody here does that anymore do they?
How many lines of code per day do you actually write? 10? 100? 1000?
If we assume something like 30 characters per line, and maybe five characters to a word, you'd be writing 600 "words" in a day where you'd write 100 lines, and as many as 6000 "words" in a 1000 loc day.
100 wpm for 600 words means you're saving 6 minutes per day over the 50 wpm guy. Not much, I doubt anyone would care about 6 mins one way or the other. 100 wpm for 6000 words means you're saving an hour over the 50 wpm guy. It's rare you write 1000 loc. I don't know if I've ever done it, myself.
But that's just code. How often do you write non-code related work? Documentation, email, notes, comments, spec, etc. 6000 words per day is probably not uncommon for a developer when you include the noncode writing a dev will do during a day, and when a 100 wpm guy gets done a whole hour before the 50 wpm guy, that's an undeniable advantage.
If you have two candidates who you're certain are equally good developers, then obviously the one who types faster will be more marginally more productive. But I wouldn't assume typing speed or style is an accurate proxy for programming ability.
I think it's rather a proxy of how long the person spends writing on a computer. For a programmer more time spent writing generally means more time programming, which means more experience.
I don't think time gains because of faster typing don't even factor into a decision, but broader knowledge/experience does.
I don't know, but typing that slowly means that there is a barrier between the thought and the deed. It like if you wrote a poem, then started speaking the letters one by one in Morse code --- and you refuse to learn Morse code so you have to look up each letter's code as you go.
My former coworker would use the mouse to copy and paste even 3-letter variable names rather than typing them in again. He'd also scroll his terminal window up and copy and paste old commands (again, all with the mouse) rather than using the up arrow, even after I told him about command line history and tab completion in case he didn't know, and would frequently mis-copy and miss the first letter off or have a stray $ at the front, causing him to start his mousing over from scratch rather than using the keyboard to correct it.
I am not the most patient of people and had to bite my tongue a few times when instructing him. I can understand being more comfortable with the mouse than keyboard shortcuts but programming is not the best profession for anyone keyboard-averse to that level.
Of course some people genuinely find the keyboard physically uncomfortable and there's no reason they couldn't still be excellent programmers - but it seems like it would impede the "flow".
I'm not sure it makes a big difference. You're going to have to waste a HUGE amount of time doing things the inefficient way (whichever it is for the task at hand) before it will be the equal of arriving late for even just one day, or taking an extra 5 minutes at lunch.
Things I suspect you'd be better off getting good at than keyboard shortcuts:
* Regular expression search and replace
* The command line (default Windows command prompt is fine), and the POSIX-style command line tools (default Windows command line tools are NOT fine)
* Some kind of popular scripting-type language (perl/python/ruby/whatever/etc.), if you don't know one already
I like my keyboard shortcuts, but the above have saved me much, much more time over the years.
A pointing device is often quicker than the keyboard without sufficient shortcuts, however, and this includes too many IDEs, including, for all practical purposes, every one you rarely use.
We must have worked with the same guy! This is a guy would literally right-click -> copy, right-click -> paste everything. It was so frustrating watching him do even the simplest of tasks.
Then there was the day when he had to merge a huge branch back in TFS. I try not to speak much of that day...
If typing is hard then you're less likely to go back over your code and correct typos and minor errors. At any rate, hunt-and-peck typists tend not to spend time going back over the code and formatting it nicely.
I used to be one of those. Until one day a colleague noticed and made a remark. Then I looked at other colleagues and realized my problem. I used http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/ to fix it.
I'm still trying, but it's demanding more discipline from me than I thought I'd need at first. It's hard to get rid of bad habits when they've already become muscle memory.
I actually learned to type mostly by playing text based games (muds [telnet elephant.org]). Having to type fast enough to not get killed by the monsters helped me learn. Of course alot of players just set up scripts or triggers in mud clients. I mostly used straight telnet to play.
I found http://play.typeracer.com/ a fun way to get my typing speed up. I originally just went there to play around with my shiny new mechanical keyboard (which turned out to be very nice to use) and then it replaced minesweeper for short mental breaks.
Admittedly, I was typing pretty fast before I started--I think I went from something like 80 wpm to 110. But it was certainly fun!
As an aside, I've found short mental breaks like that really help when I get stuck on some little issue or bug and am not making any progress. It also keeps me from getting too frustrated!
I'm in college taking some CS classes and the actual material is great, but the framework code they give us for projects is really poorly written Python. I've spent more time grappling with Python and their code than I have with AI or compiler concepts! Taking a break whenever I encountered yet another stupid bug helped me avoid spending hours going in circles.
It's perhaps one of the effective filters while hiring. Not just the typing speed, but the general use of command line tools and keyboard shortcuts. Most good developers that I know are masters of the keyboard. They rarely ever touch the mouse.
A little bit of shell scripting goes a long way in automating away dev work.