Poll Results for “How much do you value your keyboard typing skills?”

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier on

Nearly 22,000 CSS-Tricks visitors voted in this one. A majority (72%) voted that they can type well. Only very few (6%) said they had limited typing ability. The rest in the “OK” range. The voting was broken up in a 1-10 scale. See the complete results in the sidebar of the site.

Here’s the full results:

See the Pen Results for “How much do you value your keyboard typing skills?” Poll by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

This was an awkward poll (my fault) because I was interested both in how good you are at typing as well as how much you care about that. Do those things go hand in hand, or not? Probably would have been better as two separate questions.

The most voted-for single option, by far, was [8] Quite valuable. I can type well but I don’t really practice. That resonates with me. I feel like I’m just fine thank you very much at typing. I never set out to get better at it, but I sure do it a lot. And I kinda presume I get better at it the more I do it because that’s how everything else in the world works. Although I’m sure dedicated practice/training would surely level me up faster.

It seems to me, from what we have here, most people consider themselves good typists and don’t worry too much about it. Very few people can’t do it. And there is a surprisingly large contingent who value it enough to practice (or at least consider themselves very good at it).

Related article: We Are Typists First, Programmers Second in which Jeff Atwood values typing highly:

When you’re a fast, efficient typist, you spend less time between thinking that thought and expressing it in code. Which means, if you’re me at least, that you might actually get some of your ideas committed to screen before you completely lose your train of thought. Again.

Any final thoughts on this matter? Let’s talk it out in the comments.

New poll next week.