An analysis of Stack Overflow survey data has revealed a surprising finding: developers who use spaces to indent make more money than developers who use tabs to indent, even if they have the same level of experience. More specifically, the median “spaces” developer made $59,140, while the median “tabs” developer made $43,750 per year. Interestingly, the spaces vs. tab effect did not seem to be related to any other factor, such as country, type of developer, which programming languages the developer uses or even how long they have been programming.
When Stack Overflow built a model based on the statistical information, they found that using spaces instead of tabs resulted in an average 8.6 percent salary increase, or the equivalent of 2.4 years of experience.