Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs

So there you have it.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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11 Responses:

  1. anon3494 says:

    The stackoverflow comment thread made me want to drink myself into a stupor.

  2. Jan Kujawa says:

    I've been using your untabify code in emacs for a hell of a long time.
    I wish more people would.

  3. tfb says:

    Did they control for age? Based on really anecdotal experience (me) I wouldn't be surprised if, eventually, people get shafted enough times by using tabs that they just do whatever is necessary to not ever have to deal with them again. But people learn slowly, so it will be mostly older programmers that have learnt. And, of course, older programmers get paid more (do they?)

    • thielges says:

      Yeah that was my hypothesis too. Every time I encounter spaces in code it was due to a noob developer who's never worked on a large project requiring collaboration with a large number of people.

      Not sure how I would have answered that survey question though. I use the tab key all the time though have my text editor configured to convert tabs to spaces on the fly.

      • thielges says:

        Er. That should have read "Every time I encounter tabs in code....". Spaces are just fine

    • Jeremy Leader says:

      The article says the correlation survived when respondents were grouped by age, country of residence, programming language, developer type, or range of experience (though they didn't provide a graph grouped by experience).

  4. Peter Norvig says:

    To de-clickbait the headline: "Companies that pay more happen to specify spaces in their style guide."

  5. anon3494 says:

    From n-gate:
    Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs
    June 15, 2017 (comments)
    Some asshole draws invalid conclusions from a dataset comprised entirely of morons. A few Hackernews realize what a ridiculous waste of energy this was, but most set about earnestly defending their meaningless preferences regarding trivial bullshit. One idiot declares the preferred whitespace to be "more egalitarian." Hackernews takes this claim seriously, and has opinions about it.

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