If I'm using an IDE that handles whitespace and indentation am I using spaces or tabs?
If a tree falls in the forest, etc
Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
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Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm thinking this has more to do with it.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#33Maybe it's an age thing : older devs tend to prefer spaces and are usually more paid than young devs.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#34Older people use spaces. Older people make more money because they are further along in their career. Thus it only appears spaces make more than tabs, when it's really about age.
Just a guess.
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#35Good thing things like YAML have now trained me to only use spaces. Also for those looking to make a quick buck, emacs has `c-x h m-x untabify` enjoy
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#36correlation != causation
Which is exactly what the article says.
> The model estimated that using spaces instead of tabs leads to a 8.6% higher salary (confidence interval (6%, 10.4%), p-value Maybe I'm not up on my statistics lingo, but saying "using spaces instead of tabs leads to a higher salary" sounds much more causal than "using spaces instead of tabs is correlated with a higher salary."
If they're going to say something leads to something else, I don't see how that one's justified over the reverse: "having a higher salary leads to using spaces." Isn't that's just as valid a conclusion from the data?
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#37I 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,…
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Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#38What if you control for the size of the space bar and the size of the tab key?
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#39First thought: perhaps languages that officially recommend spaces (e.g. Python) predict higher salaries compared to those that recommend tabs (e.g. Go)?
Re: Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
#40Possible explanation: Tab vs space is likely to be correlated with technology (C vs Java vs JavaScript) and different technologies pay differently.