Question in the title. I got the inspiration from another thread I won’t mention to not spoil the answer, but I’ve always had a surefire way to tell them apart. Can you?
Semi-serious answer although I half suspect this is a set-up to a joke.
Salesmen use one finger, maybe 1 finger per hand if they’re really good. Devs/engineers use all 10 fingers, but with some really weird idiosyncratic fingerings nowhere near the traditional “home keys”.
Well, that’s not what I was going after, and while the engineer’s way of typing is really like you describe it (at least THIS engineer’s way of typing), I’ve always had the impression that sales people learned to properly touch type more frequently in their education than techies, at least here in Germany.
ETA: and no, it’s not a joke question, it’s (semi-)serious.
ETA2: of course in German there’s a word for the one finger method: Adlersuchmethode, eagle search method. You know, you let your finger circle over they keyboard like an eagle going for prey, and if you spot the key, you plunge down on it.
English: “Hunt and peck”.
Yeah, so both terms are pretty much using the same metaphor.
I had a secretary once who told me I typed amazingly fast, considering how wrong I did it.
“Hunt and peck” always makes me think of chickens, not eagles.
One of the most senior engineers at the place I started my career in tech typed with two fingers. And he used a line editor (ed) on a CRT. An amazingly productive guy despite all that.
RIP Fred
You can tell by who uses a dollar sign.
A sales person will never use a dollar sign, as they never want to reveal the price of anything, whereas a programmer will as it’s often used in various computer programming languages.
That was just a semi-joking answer.
I have no clue otherwise…never sat near a programmer before to watch them type. I, however, used to work in sales, and I type like any regular person does - I can type fairly fast, but not without mistakes, so I’d say I’m about average.
I’m a hunt-and-pecker, but I do so as fast as most “proper” touch-typers. I learned by being involved in IRC chats back when I was in college.
Hmm… I am (was) a programmer/engineer and am now thinking over my typing quirks (specifically when programming, I guess)…
I can touch-type, relatively fast. I certainly keep my hands on the home row… maybe something about using special characters and hot-keys? I use a lot of shortcuts, especially when programming - using the shift+arrows and up and down to highlight lines to copy/paste.
Maybe semi-colons? I certainly use more of those than a typical writer would. Maybe that’s a C/C++ legacy?
Or that I prefer using spaces to tab stops?
Coding makes a difference. I can touch type, don’t need to look at the keyboard or the screen. I can copy a document propped up in front of the screen with a low error rate as long as it’s ordinary text.
Coding changes things. There’s heavy use of punctuation characters, but not for their original purpose. Across languages those characters have different meanings to me, sometimes even different names that I think to myself. For example I think of ‘*’ as ‘star’ or ‘asterisk’ in different contexts, yet those names aren’t exclusive to their functions either. And on top of that there are different usage patterns that change finger optimizations I use.
Some of us learned to type in junior high on real typewriters where making a mistake was a real pain. I only learned to type at high speeds playing Empire on PLATO, where typos or being slow would get you killed. No joystick, just keyboard, and it didn’t use the touch screen.
My first programs were done using a Friden Flexowriter and later a card punch, so it made no sense to type quickly on those clunkers.
This was me, in the mid to late 80s on some text based multi-user dial up games hosted on The Major BBS systems. The faster you could type, the better the chances of staying alive, or picking up an object.
I’m now a programmer, and while typing I keep my fingers based on the home row. If I pause to think, I tend to relax my hands a bit, letting the ring and middle fingers extend to a more natural position, so they rest on the QWERTY line.
As a meta-question I find it interesting that the OP chose “sales person” as his go-to example of a non-programmer/engineer who types.
To me, salespersons are the least administratively capable of all office workers. They went into sales precisely to stay away from all forms of “paperwork” (now screen-work).
IME/IMO bookkeepers, admins, legal/compliance people, HR, general management, etc., are the people who live on their keyboards. Sales folks are trying as hard as possible never to touch one. Which is why they Adlersuchmethode.
You can tell an accountant or bookkeeper because they’ll use the numeric pad. Or at least they did in the olden days. Don’t think they still train on adding machines but who knows what an accountant might do left to themselves.
That’s easy to explain, I misjudged the meaning of sales people in English and went from the German word “Kaufleute” (which is the literal translation, but seems to differ in scope like I learned just now) which is a catch-all term for the professions you mention, including not only people who do actual sales, but also accountants, banking staff, bookkeepers and so on. Sorry for that.
As you might know, Germany has a rather unique vocational system, and there are a lot of different “Kaufleute” specialized for different areas:
Industriekaufleute: general accountant in industry
Bürokaufleute: general accountant in offices
Bankkaufleute: banking
Versicherungskaufleute: insurance
Reiseverkehrskaufleute: travel agencies
and so on. You get the picture.
Bingo, that’s what I was going for. All the people working in such jobs I know and watched typing use the num pad for entering numbers, while techies almost always use the top row number keys.
Kaufleute makes complete sense. Thank you. In English we might say “business person” (historically “businessman”) for the same idea. That word has some connotation of owner / executive rather than mere clerical cubicle drone, but not entirely.
Funny. I was a techie back when mice were first invented. I was doing a lot of 1-2-3 development then. I’m (very) right handed but when I got my first mouse I used it left-handed precisely to keep my right hand free for the numeric pad & cursor arrow buttons on the old 84-key original PC keyboard. To this day I still mouse left-handed.
Back in Ye Earlye Dayes there was no provision in Windows for reversing the mouse buttons. So despite mousing with my left hand, to this day I have the left mouse button configured as primary & the right as secondary.
I never would have gotten there, because other than when using a laptop or device without the number pad I almost always use the numpad for numeric entry. Particularly if doing a lot of it (say, filling a data table or something). It’s very convenient to have the right hand on the numpad and the left hand on the arrow keys to move around and enter data into a spreadsheet.
I knew that from the pattern of your username. Programmers either use_these_a_lot, or they useCamelBackNotation.