Programmers Who Use Spaces Earn More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs

Short Bytes: According to the latest survey published by Stack Overflow’s data scientist David Robinson, who prefers spaces, developers who use spaces make more money than the tab-using crowd. This result is surprising, given the fact that the use of tabs is recommended in the programming community. It was also found out that using spaces increases the pay equivalent to an extra 2.4 years of experience.

In the world of programming, there’s no debate more evergreen than the argument of spaces versus tabs. If you’re working in a team, the disagreement on code formatting due to spaces and tabs is bound to occur. Well, just like Stack Overflow’s data scientist David Robinson, many people didn’t consider it particularly important.

Here’s a clip from HBO’s Silicon Valley that you’d definitely find amusing:

Spaces versus Tabs: Who earns more?

But, according to an early analysis of the raw data from the Stack Overflow 2017, the programmers who use spaces make more money than tabs-using coders.

According to the results of this spaces versus tabs analysis that covered 28,657 respondents, 40.7% people used tabs and 41.8% people used spaces. The number of people using both was 17.5%. Out of them, 12,426 people provided their salary.

The median salary of the developers who used spaces was $59,140. Surprisingly, this number for tabs developer was $43,750, i.e., 8.6% lower salary.

Stack’s analytical model also concluded that using spaces raises the salary equivalent to extra 2.4 years of experience.

Here’s are some graphs showing the salary differences between developers within United States, India, United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada. You can see that effect is smaller in European countries and larger in India. However, it isn’t a single factor.

The survey outlines some more interesting data, which can be found here.