I once interviewed with a cast and two different YC start-ups gave me speed coding problems. One even made me type with their laptop versus a split keyboard I had where I could actually reach all the keys. They used completion time as a metric even though I asked for an accommodation and it was obvious as I typed in front of them that the cast was major drag on me.

Pretend your colleague had a cast and couldn’t type for a few weeks. Is that person going to get put on the time-sensitive demo where 10k SLOC need to be written this week? Or the design / PoC project that much less SLOC but nobody knows if it will work? Or the process improvement projects that require a bunch of data mining, analysis, and presentation?

It’s not hard to find ways to not discriminate against disabilities on short notice. The problem is, at least in my experience with these YC start-ups who did not, there’s so much naïveté combined with self-righteousness that they’d rather just bulldoze through candidates like every other problem they have.

Amusingly, this might actually be an ADA infraction. See https://www.smithlaw.com/newsletter?item_id=75 - temporary injuries can be a disability. (IANAL)

If someone presented me with a speed-timed programming exercise, I'd walk out the door.

Any in-person coding exercise with a time-box (say, the standard one-hour slot) is “timed” in some sense. I don’t think we always consider it as such, but if you can’t type fast due to arthritis it could definitely be problematic.

I walk for any code monkey hoop jump exercises. Timed or not.

When you apply to be a carpenter they don’t make you hammer nails, when you apply to be a accountant they don’t have you prepare a spreadsheet for them, etc.

I don’t work (even in interviews) for free.

I don't mind them. I expect any company worth a damn to want to screen out people who can't code. When I work there and interview other candidates, I don't want my time to be wasted, and I don't want to work with people who can't do their job.

A quick coding test is something that any places where people should know how to code has to do, doing it through one of those platforms seems perfectly reasonable, and I'm happy to do it.

Writing fizzbuzz is not "working for free" any more than any other form of interviews.

And is the "when you apply to be a carpenter" sentence really true? I've heard of the interview process for welders being "here's a machine and two pieces of metal, I'll watch".

What if the job requires you to type quickly? Why would someone with arthritis even want a job where you have to type quickly? Is that really discrimination or is that the candidate simply not being able to perform the job?

What you are describing is called a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ). The specifics of what sort of attributes might be covered for what jobs is something courts hash out, but broadly: if you're hiring workers for a warehouse it's fine to require workers be able to lift boxes. If you're hiring airline pilots, it's fine to turn away blind people. Etc.

If the job actually requires typing quickly like a Court Recorder then there is a basis to require typing quickly. If the job doesn’t actually require it, like for example a programmer then enforcing the requirement anyway is discrimination.

Most jobs that involve typing benefit from being able to type quickly.

For example, I am a frequent customer of U-Haul. I learned to not use the branch that’s closest to me, because some employees there are really slow with computers, which makes checking out equipment very slow, and frequently results in a long line of waiting customers. Driving 5 extra minutes saves me 20 minutes of waiting for employees to type in everything and click through the system.

And this is freaking uhaul. If you’re a software engineer, slow typing is also a productivity drain: a 3 minutes email becomes 6 minutes one, a 20 minutes slack conversation becomes 30 minutes etc. It all adds up.

Small productivity drains on minority portions of the task are not a requirement of doing the job. Software developers generally spend more time thinking than typing. Typing is not the bottleneck of the job (at least for the vast majority of roles).

Sure, of course typing is not the biggest bottleneck in software engineer job. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant for productivity.

Consider another example: police officers need to do a lot of typing to create reports. A fast typing officer can spend less time writing up reports, and more time responding to calls. That makes him more productive, all else being equal. Of course it would be silly to consider typing speed as a sole qualification for a job of police officer (or, for that matter, a software engineer), but it is in no way unreasonable to take it into account when hiring.

> Most jobs that involve typing benefit from being able to type quickly.

Maybe. If you type 10,000 words per minute but your entire module gets refactored out of the codebase next week, is your productivity anything higher than 0?

Multiple times in my career, months or even years worth of my team's work was tossed in the trash because some middle manager decided to change directions. A friend of mine is about ready to quit at AMZN because the product he was supposed to launch last year keeps getting delayed so they can rewrite pieces of it. Maybe some people should have thought more and typed less.

> Maybe. If you type 10,000 words per minute but your entire module gets refactored out of the codebase next week, is your productivity anything higher than 0?

If you spent less time typing that module that later went to trash, you are, in aggregate, more productive than someone who spent more time typing the same module.

This sort of argument only makes sense if you assume that there is some sort of correlation, where people who are slower at typing are more likely to make better design or business decisions, all else being equal. I certainly have no reason to believe it to be true. Remember we are talking about the issue in context of someone who is slow at typing because of arthritis. Does arthritis make people better at software design, or communication? I don’t think so.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is the definition of a reasonable accommodation. Maybe not a court transcriptionist but almost all jobs with typing would be fine with it.

When job requirements actually match the job, then you can worry about this.

Think about what you just wrote. This is a programming job, not something like a transcriptionist gig. Why do you feel that your “what if” is appropriate?

Besides, the point seems to have been about interview practices. You know, those practices which are often quite removed from the actual on-the-job tasks.

What if I was disabled to the degree that I couldn’t leave the house, but I could work remotely (an office job)? That’s what accomodations are for.