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Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

stackoverflow.blog

21–30 of 690 posts

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#22
post #9
post #4

I needed a good laugh this morning. But of course this is pretty bogus relationship. People who drive Teslas make more money than those who drive Gremlins.

But there's an actual causation here (you need more money to buy a Tesla). Use of tabs and salary don't seem to have any relation one way or an other. My personal guess would be that using spaces is a practical decision and might be more popular towards older, more experienced devs (who are therefore better paid). On paper tabs sounds better, they're "configurable", you should indent with tabs and align with spaces,…

Personally, I have bad experience with tabs. Experience and salary are correlated.

Also some languages are "tab friendly" and there are correlations between language and salary; see previous HN posts on the topic.

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#23
post #4

I needed a good laugh this morning. But of course this is pretty bogus relationship. People who drive Teslas make more money than those who drive Gremlins.

I thought the same before reading the article. But they actually tried to control for other variables (experience, country, language).

If you know another variable that explains the difference please let us know.

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#26
post #9
post #4

I needed a good laugh this morning. But of course this is pretty bogus relationship. People who drive Teslas make more money than those who drive Gremlins.

But there's an actual causation here (you need more money to buy a Tesla). Use of tabs and salary don't seem to have any relation one way or an other. My personal guess would be that using spaces is a practical decision and might be more popular towards older, more experienced devs (who are therefore better paid). On paper tabs sounds better, they're "configurable", you should indent with tabs and align with spaces,…

There could be a third factor of conscientiousness that causes both high salary and use of spaces (to align your code just right). At least I will be using that excuse now when I spend time aligning function parameters in table columns.

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#28
"The model estimated that using spaces instead of tabs leads to a 8.6% higher salary".

So the model actually predicts causality, instead of correlation? That's amazing. I'll start using spaces instead of tabs today and I will ask for a 8.6% raise.

According to this model, I should get it!

Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs

#30
As a spaces user, I have to acknowledge that I get irritated when I open a document with tabs and the formatting is messed up thanks to tab setting mismatches.

Is it possible that tab-aversive people making hiring decisions act on their aversions (consciously or unconsciously), while tab-friendly hiring managers do not?

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