Using tabs is perhaps a proxy for a willingness to assume risk and complexity for no engineering value, and that is worth negative money.
I personally use only spaces because it reduces complexity and I want to concentrate writing programs.
Tab users are willing to assume a little extra complexity (an extra, special character) and assume uncompensated risk (that tabs will display poorly; that someone's text-processing tool will handle them differently and destroy your indentation) for no obvious reward.
If tabs are disallowed, all printable ASCII characters have width 1. Life is simple for text processing.
If tabs are allowed, there's an additional character that has an unknown width, dependent on either the local installation, or the project that you are in.
So this is why the tab group gets paid less - because they cause work for the rest of us for no gain.
No one really cares about this detail, but it shows a desire to impose your arbitrary aesthetic choices on the rest of us at the cost of more work for the rest of us, and, well, that's bad for the rest of us.
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No one would ever invent a tab character for a terminal if it didn't already exist, and it existed because typerwriters and early printers had physical tabs you could set by moving little physical sliders around.
In codebases I control, everything is UTF-8, there are exactly two whitespace characters allowed, "space" and "carriage return", and every text file ends with a carriage return (so each line in that file ends with a carriage return). Everyone's text processing program works with this out of the box.
It is just less work for me so I can get on to writing computer programs and not writing code figuring out what a tab is supposed to mean in some text file - and that means more actual computer programming for me.
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I never thought of asking spaces vs tabs as an interview question, but now I think it might be a way of bring out people who might cause work for others - to ask the question and see how much "shrug" you get vs "grr". You're looking for "shrug" on this issue.
