Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by tomsmeding » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:04 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #61

Pretty simple: you use spaces because you're aware that there is more than one IDE/editor in this world and who knows what your code will get opened with tomorrow. This means you consider consequences beyond "but it works on my machine" so you're a better programmer. Ergo, higher salary.

In fact, tabs are better for compatibility: other people might like other indentation sizes. If you keep your stuff consistently with tabs, and use spaces for alignment instead of having your IDE auto-replace tabs there as well, your code will look great with whatever tab size someone chooses. And extra pro: in dumb editors, you automatically get the right thing.

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

#72

Post by thehardsphere » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:04 PM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #33

Maybe it's an age thing : older devs tend to prefer spaces and are usually more paid than young devs.

They explicitly rejected this explanation after controlling for years of experience.

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

#73

Post by fcanas » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:04 PM UTC

A possibility I haven't seen mentioned is that the style guide of their employer, together with a few employers who pay out-sized salaries (Google, Amazon, Facebook...) could account for the difference.

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

#74

Post by IanDrake » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #44

IanDrake wrote: post #34

Older 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.

The graph has experience as its y axis.

Ugh. I'm old and and can't see without my glasses.

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

#75

Post by notheguyouthink » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

MrCrbll wrote: post #27

lvoudour wrote: post #14

>Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs Sure, but how many spaces? grabs popcorn

Where does using vim to insert four Spaces everytime I press tab leave me?

Yea, I'm honestly surprised this is a thing still. I've not thought about the tab vs spaces "war" in years; because of Vim. I just hit Tab and whatever the pre-defined standard is, be it tabs or spaces and space count, is used.

Visually I can have it display in my editor of choice (Kakoune at the moment) however I want.

I guess I'm just saying, I would have thought the most common answer to this question would be: Whatever my employer / language standards dictate.

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

#76

Post by thehardsphere » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #34

Older 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.

This is the third time I've noticed that people didn’t read the article closely enough to note that this explanation was explicitly rejected after the author controlled for years of experience and the effect was still present.

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

#77

Post by kalleboo » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

Am I alone in not even knowing what I use? I use the formatting standard that my IDE enforces.

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

#78

Post by peterbonney » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #61

Pretty simple: you use spaces because you're aware that there is more than one IDE/editor in this world and who knows what your code will get opened with tomorrow. This means you consider consequences beyond "but it works on my machine" so you're a better programmer. Ergo, higher salary.

^^^ Exactly. Using tabs is a decent (albeit not perfect) indicator that you've never worked under source control on a large dev team with diverse working habits.

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

#79

Post by icebraining » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #36

icebraining wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

Yes, the word "leads" was an unfortunate choice.

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

#80

Post by peterbonney » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

sambe wrote: post #70

nottorp wrote: post #61

Pretty simple: you use spaces because you're aware that there is more than one IDE/editor in this world and who knows what your code will get opened with tomorrow. This means you consider consequences beyond "but it works on my machine" so you're a better programmer. Ergo, higher salary.

I think there's probably some truth to considering existing norms and thinking ahead, but find it unlikely to be the main confounder. How do tabs fail to work in other editors/IDEs?

Tabs fail when my IDE is set to convert tabs to spaces and yours isn't.