[NAR8789]

Wait, how common is it to not know touch typing?

Honest question, maybe a blind spot of mine. Touch typing is so integrated into my daily experience it feels like driving or riding a bike. I mostly learned to touch type in the 90s just chatting with friends on AOL instant messenger. I think of touch typing as something nearly everyone picks up just as a side effect of living with computers.

[toyg]

Chatting nowadays happens with thumbs.

Even in previous generations, most self-taught people get fast at hunt&peck rather than learning proper touch-typing. It is not a natural skill in any way, you need a conscious effort to stop looking and to limit your main fingers wandering.

I generally tried to keep my kids away from excessive screen usage, but I motivated them to touch-type anyway, because I always wished I'd learned it earlier than I did (in my early 30s). I see them reaping benefits already in their teenage years, knocking out school assignments very quickly and being able to focus on the content more than the typing.

[garrettgarcia]

I'm also confused by this. I taught myself touch typing in the 90's. I also had a required semester-long class that covered only typing my freshman year of high school (1999). Neither of my parents learned it, but I figured everyone younger than me knew how. Pretty shocking to find out that's not the case.

I can't imagine not being able to touch-type. It's such second-nature that I can hold a conversation with someone while typing out separate thoughts I'm having about the conversation on a keyboard.

[chneu]

The average American types around 40wpm, so definitely not touch typing. People definitely get by without learning it.

I work in a huge variety of fields and interact with people from all places in US society. My guess would be maybe 25-35% of people I've worked with use touch typing. Everyone chicken pecks.

Most people use phones nowadays and rarely use a physical keyboard. It just isn't that important to most people. They can get by without it.

[Izkata]

It's pretty difficult to pick it up naturally when you only use a touchscreen and never a keyboard, since there aren't any physical keys to stabilize your hand position. It's becoming more common for people to only use their phones or tablet and not a desktop or laptop.

[morkalork]

Yeah this is mind boggling to me as a millennial. I didn't set out to learn touch typing either. Hell, my sister who isn't a techie learned to do it just be spending all afternoon on LiveJournal and AIM chat. I don't understand how one could be an avant reader of hn and be interested in an article about this like... you don't? You can't? Whaaaa?

[absoluteunit1]

Honestly I'm consistently surprised - I've worked at Amazon and seen many engineers, product people, etc type with incorrect techniques.

I've seen interns looking for symbols on their keyboard for a second or two (the tilde "~" or the pipe symbols "|") when I asked them to type in a certain shell command.

Since I started building this website, many of my friends and family learned touch typing because of the site never even heard of proper touch typing technique until I started talking about what I was working on.

I think it's due to poor education - there's no institutionalized course that teaches this. A couple schools maybe, but nothing on a big scale.

Kind of mind boggling given that almost every desk job uses a keyboard