100th percentile of speed typing: 100th percentile of speed typing

I taught myself how to speed type as a side effect, beginning the process back as a 6-7 years old kid while tinkering with ZX-Spectrum, the very first computer I had, taking pause during teenage years and resuming it after our father brought home PC computer.

After a while I became quite good at it. My relatives had noticed it and started to compliment and praise it. I was humble about it on the surface but deep down was also kind of proud of. After all, they were stating the fact, I was able to type fast, and it left me feeling superior.

Fast-forward to the time I’ve relocated to the Netherlands, in particular just after one year of living there and have just been switched the job/company. Among my new team members was Nick (linkedin.com/in/nickvanderlaan), back then fresh graduate out of university. One day I stopped by his desk and noticed a thing which made my jaw drop. Nick was speed typing, however the way he was doing it was different. Firstly, the speed, he was typing really fast. Secondly, his accuracy was 99%, almost no mistakes. It got me curious, I acknowledged both points to Nick and asked how did he become so good. “All Dutch children are taught speed typing in school. There is an exam one need to pass as well.” - was his answer. Next thing Nick did was to open speed typing assessment online tool where he scored ~100 words per minute with 99% accuracy in 1 minute, while I was blocking keyboard out of his sight with a sheet of paper.

Nick’s skills made me realize there is relative performance (you comparing to your peers or your grandmother) and there is absolute performance (percentiles, such as 90th etc, of all people in the world). It was obvious before, in terms of any other skill, difference for speed typing being that in my mind I was somewhere in ~90th percentile however that judgement was off by a lot.

Devil’s advocate might say - as a software engineers or developers we don’t type that much (in fact, ‘we are not hiring typists but programmers’ - was the comment of a business person from another team) and majority time is spent instead reading the code, attending meetings and communicating. That is fair point, however, I would argue that automating it to the muscle memory frees up more time to spent while being in the flow state (which sometimes is hard to get in and retain).

I also realized that my self-taught way was inferior in few ways:

  • I was still looking at a keyboard, though not directly but more of using peripheral vision. Quick experiment of blocking it revealed which key locations were easily reachable and which ones caused hesitation.
  • I was using hunt-and-pecking method for the majority of special characters and digits.

Since then, I’ve tried multiple offline and online speed typing tools and ended up practicing using following ones:

It made me somewhat better but still not as good as Nick. Now, however, I have a fair assessment and metrics to use. So that, the only thing left is to keep practicing thus constantly improving.

P.S. One more benefit of speed typing is to an ability to show case it as part of other skills you have in job interview setting. I’ve been on both sides of the table. As interviewer, painfully watching potential candidate hunt-and-pecking which undermines your opinion about his/her qualifications (even though it could be the only skill lacking). As interviewee, getting anxious in the middle of typing a code and becoming self-conscious about it and regressing to two-fingers typing.