After 5 years of Dvorak, I am switching back to Qwerty.
In 2012 I, with two other nerdy roommates, switched to Dvorak. Five years later (four of them spent as a Software Engineer) I am switching back to Qwerty. In fact, I am struggling at 30 WPM (a 70% reduction in speed) to write this post now.
Why did I switch in the first place?
The TL;DR on this is my friends and I didn’t have jobs and were incredibly bored, but there’s more to it than that. Early in my career I thought optimizing every portion of my interaction with my code would make me a better engineer. I used a crazy Awesome WM setup on Arch Linux. My Vim and ZSH were 256 color beauties with power-lines and git integrations. I spent hours configuring these.
A part of my blind optimization was switching to Dvorak. Because I could spell 70% of words on the home row (or something like that) I felt like it was an empirically superior layout. It took me a little under three weeks to get used to it (again, no job), but after that I was typing at 70 WPM, which is where I was at with Qwerty.
Dvorak is not “faster” than Qwerty, but after using it for five straight years at 40 hours a week…
