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.

I set tab to call auto-indent or the language formatter on the code. I literally hit tab once to insert whatever is the defined standard for the file. So my single tab key press inserts or removes exactly the right amount of white space.

It's a holdover from my emacs days; the one thing I could not give up from emacs...

Unless the project you're working on has an Editorconfig file and your IDE supports it (VS and IntelliJ do by default).

In this case it is supposed to override your IDE settings.

But that just contributes to the gap, the kind of place that devotes time to things like shared editor configs is the kind of place with enough money (and interest) to contribute to development quality, and places like that probably pay more.

The average "sweatshop/devshop" developer probably doesn't even know/care about tabs vs spaces.

The first place I would look is size of dataset and correlation effects from multiple self-reporters working for the same company.

Big companies tend to pay more in the software industry. Big companies also tend to have standardized on tabs or spaces internally to simplify the problem of merging code across developer teams. So if you find out that, hypothetically, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have all standardized internally on spaces, that alone could account for the data.

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.

It could work if the confounding factor is the one you described. But it would probably backfire if the confounding factor is which language you learned first.

Then forcing yourself to use spaces might reduce your productivity, your self-esteem and your mood.

Tab is usually three spaces, right? So if I hit the tab key, I'm getting three button presses for the price of one. So extrapolating from that, if I hit tab I can get my work done three times faster and get out of the office quicker. If I'm using space, it takes me three times longer, which makes the boss think I'm working three times harder and I get a pay raise. I'm always at the office before she is (to fill in all the spaces) and I'm at the office after she leaves (still jamming that space bar). Sure the guy who uses tab ships code faster, but it must be worse code because he obviously rushed through it.

It looks good that I'm such a hard worker. So I get paid more.

A quality analysis, but you're neglecting the wear on your space key. Managers tend to look askance at wasting capex, so I'd recommend taking that in to account.

With the beauty of BYOD, they don't have to worry about it anymore! It's the employee's own keyboard!

If I had to guess, developers who pay more attention to corner cases and/or carefully consider the secondary and tertiary effects of a design choice will tend to choose spaces.

- "TABS WORK GREAT FOR ME" -> First-order effect

- "If someone else views this file with a different tab width preference, the indenting will match their preference" -> Secondary effect

- "If users' preferences can change the indenting of a file, then vertically aligned elements will align or misalign depending on who's viewing it and who wrote it." -> Tertiary effect.

- "Randomly broken formatting and/or forcing users to constantly change their personal tab preferences is a bad way to work with code" -> Quaternery effect, etc.

In other words, a whole-system view that accounts for interactions with other decisions might lead you toward using spaces, while an immediate "local" view might lead you to choose the thing that seems most convenient right now.

It may also hint at the years & depth of experience & skillset.

Those who grew up in a shell often ended up building a much more diverse set of skills, the commonality of which is a lot of text based files with a favourite editor.

This extended to using tools like IntelliJ, Eclipse, etc.

Hope a follow up of this study can include the IDE's and if that has some say in this.

Kidding aside I rather doubt anything really believes there is a causal relationship between one thing and the other.

I mean in general, sure. If correlation does not imply causation then really, what does??

Yes, eg. many languages have spaces conventions formalized and those languages may pay more to develop in.

This is already accounted for in the article, the data seems to indicate this even in the same language, and consistently does so across all languages.

The effect in the data (unless it isn't random fluctuation. At the moment I'd go with the assumtion that it is a genuine correlation, as the effect is present over all subgroups), might (1) not be monocausal, i.e. a combination of contributing factors like development experience, age of IDEs/tooling, etc. might play a role as well as other aspects. (2) a cause might not be "explained away" because the control variable was considered. Let me elaborate

The years of experience variable might be taken to explain away the effect of experience, and then conclude that tabs vs. spaces must be due to another effect than years of experience. But chances are, that "years of experience" and "tabs vs. spaces" are just correlated to a common, causal property (like "programming proficiency" or however you want to call it). Both "years of experience" and "tabs vs. spaces" are then just incomplete reflections of the underlying cause, both rendering the effect of the underlying cause incompletely.

What I am trying to say is: Its complicated, probably you won't be able to find the one true cause for the effect in the data. If this were physics, one could come up with a predictive theory to put this to the test. In social studies, we just cannot control the parameters well enough.

If you are interested in reading more on this, "Causality" by Judea Pearl is a good (but exhausting read).