We could examine this by considering whether the effect occurs within each country, for several of the countries that had the most survey respondents. For example, it’s conceivable that developers in low GDP-per-capita countries could be more likely to use tabs, and therefore such developers tend to have lower salaries on average. When I first discovered this effect, I assumed that it was confounded by a factor such as country or programming language. This is an amusing result, but of course it’s not conclusive by itself.

Developers who responded “Both” were generally indistinguishable from ones who answered “Tabs”: I’ll leave them out of many of the remaining analyses. (Note that all the results were converted into US dollars from each respondent’s currency).

Indeed, the median developer who uses spaces had a salary of $59,140, while the median tabs developer had a salary of $43,750. Coders who use spaces for indentation make more money than ones who use tabs, even if they have the same amount of experience: Of them, 12,426 also provided their salary.Īnalyzing the data leads us to an interesting conclusion. Within this group, 40.7% use tabs and 41.8% use spaces (with 17.5% using both). There were 28,657 survey respondents who provided an answer to tabs versus spaces and who considered themselves a professional developer (as opposed to a student or former programmer). But today we’re releasing the raw data behind the Stack Overflow 2017 Developer Survey, and some analysis suggests this choice matters more than I expected. I use spaces, but I never thought it was particularly important. This is a bit of a “holy war” among software developers one that’s been the subject of many debates and in-jokes. Do you use tabs or spaces for code indentation?

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