Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 690 posts

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

#111

Post by nraynaud »

TekMol wrote: post #42

This does not mean that changing from tabs to spaces will increase ones income. I would expect there simply is a confounding factor that the author did not look at. Maybe the info is not in the data. I can imagine that the space/tab choice is related to the "upbringing" of the developer. Maybe which language or editor they used first in their life. Or maybe it's related to culture. For example when using IRC, tabs ar…

Yes, but since it's a human situation, you can reverse the causality link. Imagine people use spaces for an underlying reason that gives them naturally a higher salary, like Harvard Legacy applicants are taught to use spaces, they don't become wealthy because they use spaces, but because their parents were wealthy. And wealthy people hire the kids of other wealthy people with big salaries. Clearly there is no space => big salary.

If you are not born in the nobility that uses spaces, but if at first contact the people in power see you using spaces they might assume you are born a noble, and lower their anti-commoner guard for you and you have a greater chance of entering the nobility without a proper title (don't forget to slam the door after you, nobility only works on exclusivity).

So there is a path for taking the implication completely backwards and still reaching the expected outcome.

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

#112

Post by delegate »

Might also be that the space people, being irritatingly pedantic also include bonuses and/or stock compensation , while the tab people, always lazy and all over the place, just barfed the first number that came to mind.

The answer, as always, is: lisp with parinfer - makes the whole debate irrelevant.

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

#113

Post by alttab »

mbaha wrote: post #103
okreallywtf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unfair to downvote you just for misunderstanding, that was sarcasm friend.

I strongly think \s should be enforced in every post in HN.\s

Killed the fun with the second one.

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

#114

Post by shangxiao »

dmix wrote: post #100
okreallywtf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unfair to downvote you just for misunderstanding, that was sarcasm friend.

It's pretty much an unwritten rule that a sarcastic joke on the internet with sufficient exposure will get a response by someone who didn't get it. Using /s really kills the fun (and whole point) of using sarcasm so it's a trade off to accept these comments will happen. I'm impartial to downvoting as to reply literally doesn't usually add to the conversation, which is generally the point of downvoting. Losing karma s…

Known as Poe's Law [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

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

#116

Post by susw »

BoorishBears wrote: post #57
TekMol wrote: post #42

This does not mean that changing from tabs to spaces will increase ones income. I would expect there simply is a confounding factor that the author did not look at. Maybe the info is not in the data. I can imagine that the space/tab choice is related to the "upbringing" of the developer. Maybe which language or editor they used first in their life. Or maybe it's related to culture. For example when using IRC, tabs ar…

If you hit Tab in Notepad and hit save you get a file with tabs. If you hit Tab in IntelliJ or a related IDE you get a file with spaces. If you hit Tab in an older version of VS (the kind you'd expect in certain types of settings where high pay is not usually expected) you get tabs, but in newer versions you get spaces (with defaults)

Nah, they all give you tabs once you set them up correctly.

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

#117

Post by Deregibus »

mbaha wrote: post #103
okreallywtf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unfair to downvote you just for misunderstanding, that was sarcasm friend.

I strongly think \s should be enforced in every post in HN.\s

For portability you should use /s, not \s. \s only works on Windows.

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

#118

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

tomsmeding wrote: post #71
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.

I have never seen this work correctly in practice, where a code base with tabs looks "OK" when opened on an editor with a different tab width. E.g. some coding styles will have subsequent lines line up (like multiline method params), and everything looks horrible with a different tab width.

If anyone can post a sizable production code base that uses tabs that DOESN'T look like shit with a different tab width, I'm certainly open to being proven wrong.

Post reply on HN