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I needed a good laugh this morning. But of course this is pretty bogus relationship. People who drive Teslas make more money than those who drive Gremlins.
by coldcode 9y ago
I needed a good laugh this morning. But of course this is pretty bogus relationship. People who drive Teslas make more money than those who drive Gremlins.
- Cacti 9y agoYou get paid by the keypress?!
- creepydata 9y agoWho is manually entering spaces rather than instructing your editor to do it for you?
- tripzilch 9y ago... but what is pressing the space bar if not instructing the editor to insert a space for you?
- simias 9y agoBut there's an actual causation here (you need more money to buy a Tesla). Use of tabs and salary don't seem to have any relation one way or an other. My personal guess would be that using spaces is a practical decision and might be more popular towards older, more experienced devs (who are therefore better paid). On paper tabs sounds better, they're "configurable", you should indent with tabs and align with spaces, yada yada and everything is good in the world. In practice however it becomes a big mess real quick unless you only work on projects with very good and perfectionist developers who understand when they should indent and when they should align and how they should configure their editors to do the right thing. See for instance the linux kernel codebase, it looks like arse if you don't use 8-space tabs and the coding style even tells you to use that value (it shouldn't really matter if tabs were used "right", except maybe for 80-column limits). So why even bother with tabs in this situation? Do we really care that much about wasting a few bytes? Therefore I gave up on tabs a long time ago and tell everybody to just use spaces in all the projects I maintain.
- pletnes 9y agoPersonally, I have bad experience with tabs. Experience and salary are correlated. Also some languages are "tab friendly" and there are correlations between language and salary; see previous HN posts on the topic.
- yorwba 9y agoThere could be a third factor of conscientiousness that causes both high salary and use of spaces (to align your code just right). At least I will be using that excuse now when I spend time aligning function parameters in table columns.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thehardsphere 9y ago> My personal guess would be that using spaces is a practical decision and might be more popular towards older, more experienced devs (who are therefore better paid). They explicitly rejected this explanation after controlling for years of experience.
- simias 9y agoOh, you're right. My mistake. That being said I'd be curious to see "years of experience working in a team", because that's really when using tabs starts becoming tricky. If you're well disciplined and are the only person messing with your codebase the issues I mentioned in my previous post don't really apply.
- corobo 9y agoThey must be paid by the hour and all that spacebar pressing adds up
- alejohausner 9y agoProbably devs who use spaces wear out the space bar more often, and demand high salaries to replace worn-out keyboards.
- dx034 9y agoI thought the same before reading the article. But they actually tried to control for other variables (experience, country, language). If you know another variable that explains the difference please let us know.
- tripzilch 9y agoStackoverflow usage. Highly paid tabistas don't need it.
- coldtea 9y agoHow is the analogy relevant? What you wrote is self-evident (Teslas being more expensive). The other (spaces correlated with more pay) is not.