What “it” is configurable? If the code is indented with 4 spaces, it is indented with 4 spaces. You can configure your editor to indent with 1 space if you want, but then your code is not going to respect the 4 spaces of indentation used by the rest of the code.
I repeat, the only accessible indentation option is using tabs. This is not an opinion because every other option forces extra painful steps for those with vision issues (including, but not limited to, having to reformat the source files to tabs so they can work on them and then reformat them back to using spaces in order to commit them)
Sorry, this comment is causing me mental whiplash so I am either ignorant, am subject to non-standard circumstances, or both.
My personal experience is that developers (the decent ones at least) know hardware better than IT people. But maybe we mean different things by “hardware”?
You see, I work as a game dev so a good chunk of the technical part of my job is thinking about things like memory layout, cache locality, memory access patterns, branch predictor behavior, cache lines, false sharing, and so on and so forth. I know very little about hardware, and yet all of the above are things I need to keep in mind and consider and know to at least some usable extent to do my job.
While IT are mostly concerned on how to keep the idiots from shooting the company in the foot, by having to roll out software that allows them to diagnose, reset, install or uninstall things on, etc, to entire fleets of computers at once. It also just so happens that this software is often buggy and uses 99% of your cpu taking it for spin loops (they had to roll that back of course) or the antivirus rules don’t apply on your system for whatever reason causing the antivirus to scan all the object files generated by the compiler even if they are generated in a whitelisted directory, causing a rebuild to take an hour rather than 10 minutes.
They are also the ones that force me to change my (already unique and internal) password every few months for “security”.
So yeah, when you say that developers often have no idea how the hardware works, the chief questions that come to mind are