For my linear regression, I concentrated on developers located in the United States. I decided to have a closer look at the results and play with some modified models. The original post included a linear regression model that predicts salary based on several variables: Exploring the data with linear regression I started my investigation by looking at a linear regression model from the original blog post. So why do better paid developers prefer spaces? It’s clear that there must be some confounding variable but I wasn’t sure if it was present in the survey. And same goes for the size of company you’re employed in. Intresting, right? Also, the effect doesn’t seem to be related to programming language or the type of developer you are. Also, people who mix both tabs and spaces have similar salaries to people who prefer just tabs. In the original blog post, David shows that using spaces instead of tabs is associated with higher salary and this effect seems to hold regardless of the experience level. Spoiler: your salary has more to do with the type of company and the environment you work in rather than what type of indentation you use. You’ll see that tabs and spaces are not what they seem. So I’d like to invite you to follow me through a little data science detective story and a deep dive into the data from the Stack Overflow survey. The original article encouraged people to explore the data for themselves and this is precisely what I did. It’s a fun correlation but what’s behind it? This blog post is my attempt to shed some light into the issue. I believe that data science should be about answering questions and providing new insights into data - and unfortunately the original article doesn’t offer many answers. The whole story left a lot of people scratching their heads and it even made it into a BBC news story. The answer is clearly No because correlation doesn’t imply causation and intuitively the indentation of source code doesn’t have any direct causal link to anyone’s salary. So, should you start using spaces instead of tabs to increase your salary? It uses the data from Stack Overflow developer survey to show that indeed, using spaces is associated with higher salaries, even when we account for experience level. A couple of days ago, David Robinson published an article on the Stack Overflow blog with a very provocative title: Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs.
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