Stop the world, I want to get off.
The annual Stack Overflow developer surveys often include lots of bad news. "People still use PHP," for example, is a recurring and distressing theme. "Perl exists" is another.
But never before has the survey revealed something as devastatingly terrible as the 2017 survey. Using PHP and Perl are matters of taste. Extremely masochistic taste, certainly, but nobody is wrong for using those languages; it's just the programming equivalent of enjoying Adam Sandler movies. But the 2017 survey goes beyond taste; it goes into deep philosophical questions of right and wrong, and it turns out that being wrong pays more than being right.
Developers who use tabs to indent their code, developers who fight for truth and justice and all that is good in the world, those developers have a median salary of $43,750.
But developers who use spaces to indent their code, developers who side with evil and probably spend all day kicking kittens and punching puppies? Their median salary is $59,140.
"But what about those enlightened souls who use tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment?" you may ask. Sadly, they are indistinguishable from the other tab users.
Even controlling for different languages, different countries, different experience levels, the same finding held true: indenting with spaces is more lucrative than indenting with tabs. With country, years of experience, language, education level, and other factors held constant, using spaces boosts a developer's salary by 8.6 percent—the same kind of advantage that can come from 2.4 years of experience.
Truly, when it comes to software development, crime pays.
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