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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

#221

Post by jdc0589 »

austenallred wrote: post #94

Almost certainly a result of the spaces cabal and the (often unspoken of) prejudice against tab users. Don't think you make hiring decisions based on tabs vs spaces? Well you're part of the problem, then. I'm building an app to help you easily email your congressperson and ask them to create legislation requiring space/tab equality. This has to stop. Please consider donating to my Patreon.

> Don't think you make hiring decisions based on tabs vs spaces?

I actually ask candidates "spaces or tabs?" in every single interview. I don't really care what the response is in regard to the holy war, and it doesn't mean anything on its own, but having SOME thought out response can be a GREAT indicator of how well versed someone is in general.

e.g. I'm going to think way more highly of someone that says "tabs, because then people can set the indentation render size to whatever they prefer in a way that doesn't affect other users" way more than someone who says "whatever my editor sets it to".

Also, fuck spaces. Long live tabs.

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

#222

Post by ccalvert »

okreallywtf wrote: post #68
lrusnac wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, just because in 2017 storing source code is the most expensive thing for a company. but really, the storage is almost free nowadays...

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

I'm confused. Do you mean that we're allowed to create posts on Hacker News that are not sarcastic? I thought there was a rule, with a powerful AI enforcing it, stating that all posts had to be sarcastic. (Warning, this post is sarcastic and not meant to be taken literally.)

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

#224

Post by zelos »

tomsmeding wrote: post #199
redm wrote: post #123

The reason I use tabs is pretty simple. It's faster to move around only using the keyboard. It's also faster if I'm changing code that requires reformatting. Finally, when another developer looks at the code, their IDE will render the tabs as whatever its set up for, 2 spaces, 4 spaces, etc. In other words, it adds flexibility. Brace yourself: I use two spaces after the end of sentences too. [1] I am quite the rebel.…

Don Knuth seems to agree with you a bit; TeX automatically inserts some extra spacing between the end of a sentence and the beginning of the next one. You don't have to type it yourself though!

That's why most people stopped inserting the extra spaces themselves, instead allowing the layout engine/word processor etc to do it for them.

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

#225

Post by _puk »

austenallred wrote: post #94

Almost certainly a result of the spaces cabal and the (often unspoken of) prejudice against tab users. Don't think you make hiring decisions based on tabs vs spaces? Well you're part of the problem, then. I'm building an app to help you easily email your congressperson and ask them to create legislation requiring space/tab equality. This has to stop. Please consider donating to my Patreon.

Your time would be better spent implementing ':set list' on classic whiteboards.

That's where your issue lies; subconscious prejudice is happening during the hiring process, you just can't see it.

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

#226

Post by jayvanguard »

When you're working in a large company with many developers spaces make more sense. Large companies generally pay more.

In a perfect world you'd use tabs for semantic indentation and spaces for stylistic indentation but this is too hard to implement in 100+ person teams and also can't be automated via an IDE style sheet.

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

#227

Post by marcus_holmes »

andrewla wrote: post #188

The most confusing thing about this result is that go shows a high level of space-preferential salary difference. Go programmers who use spaces make ~20k more (at the median) than developers who don't. Only, in Go, you don't have a choice -- gofmt enforces tabs only (with spaces for alignment). So something seems odd there.

This! It makes me really suspicious about the data.

Are there any highly-paid Go programmers who refuse to use gofmt? That's a serious amount of effort to go to in order to make your code non-standard. Your projects will be criticised and you'll get PR's to correct them for just that reason alone.

If there are no highly-paid Go programmers who use spaces, and it seems utterly reasonable to assume that there are not since the language itself enforces tabs, then who exactly are they talking about in the data?

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

#228

Post by zcdziura »

XCSme wrote: post #203
timhwang21 wrote: post #25

Well, of course. Only companies with fuck-you money can afford the extra bytes spaces take up versus tabs, so it follows logically that they'd pay their developers more.

Well, white-space is removed anyway in compressed production files...

Woooosh...

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

#229

Post by kazinator »

http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/c-snippets/tree/autotab.c

With this, I instantly conform to how the file is formatted. Is it 3 space indentation, made with a mixture of 8-tabs and spaces? Autotab will figure it out, spit out the Vim params, and you're modifying away without causing spurious diffs in version control.

You have to learn to use Ctrl-T for indent and Ctrl-D for deindent in Vim; those obey the shiftwidth and generate indentation according to the shiftwidth, tabsize and expandtab setting.

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