Open Source Contributions More Important Than Tabs Vs Spaces For Salary (opensource.com)

Jason Baker, a Red Hat data analyst, doesn't believe developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs. An anonymous reader quotes Baker's blog post: After reading the study one data scientist, Evelina Gabasova, performed some additional analysis and came to a slightly different conclusion, which feels a little more precise: "Environments where people use Git and contribute to open source are more associated both with higher salaries and spaces, rather than with tabs." In other words, if you're at a company where you're using version control and committing open source code upstream, you're statistically a little more likely to be a space-user and a higher wage-earner.
Even across all experience levels, contributing to open source still correlates to higher salaries, Gabasova concludes. "My theory is that when diverse people are working on open source projects together without enforced coding style, the possible formatting mess is nudging people towards using spaces simply because the code is consistent for everyone.

"This is just one of the possible theories, I didn't look to see if possibly language communities that use predominantly spaces (like Python or Ruby) are more active in open source."

Comments

Here is my thought on spaces/tabs

[El Cubano]

Spaces -> the person who writes the code decides how its indentation looks

Tabs -> the person who reads the code decides how the indentation looks

Sometimes I set tabs to be 4 spaces, sometimes 8, sometimes even 2 spaces. However, if the formatting is all done with spaces I don't get that choice. I find tabs more empowering to me personally and I believe that I use them I empower those who read my code.