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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D
rwallace wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
Looking through the latest 'Who's Hiring' thread last week, I noticed
that a higher percentage of the remote jobs seemed to specify Remote
(US). Could one of the causes of that, have been employers reading
ahead and making decisions on the basis that this bill might be passed?
Or is there some other reason? Or is it just a case where it fluctuates
randomly from month to month, and I am trying to read pattern into
random noise?
ksec wrote 1 day ago:
May be a Naive Question: Has there ever been a time, where Tech or
Software companies have to pay tax even when they are un-profitable.
And if not, given the historic low interest rate, why not borrow and
continue to grow until the company can no longer manage to spend all
your debt? Correct me if I am wrong I think that used to be the
playbook for Amazon.
There are companies which I dont understand why they are keeping all
the profits and not reinvesting for R&D or other purposes. I must be
missing an angle on this. Apart from investors, what else would it be?
bjoli wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not really that into US politics, but to me this bill seems like a
gargantuan transfer of wealth to already wealthy people. How does this
land with the people who voted for Trump outside of the traditional
republicans? Can they finance it without raising the debt ceiling?
qiine wrote 1 day ago:
Humans play games to learn, the more AI do the same the better they
will get
bgnn wrote 1 day ago:
So US will continue subsidizing its R&D while complaining the rest of
the world is doing so? What changed then?
trollbridge wrote 18 hours 7 min ago:
It’s not a subsidy. They just are letting people immediately
expense R&D instead of requiring it spread over 5 years.
Spivak wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
Our glorious R&D subsidies, their savage market manipulation.
bongodongobob wrote 1 day ago:
If you're going to subsidize anything why wouldn't it be R&D
bgnn wrote 1 day ago:
There's nothing inherently wrong with it. Though it creates a
competitive advantage and forces other countries to do the same, of
not more. Everyone starts pointing fingers at each other and
imposing tariff at the end.
Plus this puts pressure on manufacturing, as they will not be able
to compete. So yeah, as a tool to boost knowledge economy it works
but is it objectively a good thing to do I don't know.
aaronblohowiak wrote 17 hours 32 min ago:
why wouldn't r&d count as an expense? why do amortization
schedules constitute a subsidy?
pavlov wrote 1 day ago:
Is there a more bizarre legislative process anywhere in the world?
The US Congress is practically able to pass only a single giant bill
every year. To work around its own deficit rules, these bills are
packed with taxation time bombs where rules have expiration dates or
delayed starts several years in the future.
Then, if Congress doesn’t get around to defusing its own time bombs,
you get situations like this R&D expensing fiasco where American
businesses and employees pay the price. Unless the bomb is hopefully
retroactively cancelled, like happened now.
On top of this madness, there’s an executive branch operating like a
runaway autocracy, producing a flood of executive orders that
intentionally flaunt laws and even target specific private entities
(e.g. Trump’s attacks on law firms that worked for his opponents, and
universities he doesn’t like).
How long can a nation function like this? If the bond market loses
faith in this process, there could be mayhem. Will be interesting to
see if the passage of BBB impacts US debt when markets open again on
Monday.
andrekandre wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
> taxation time bombs where rules have expiration dates or delayed
starts several years in the future.
> ...
> Unless the bomb is hopefully retroactively cancelled, like
happened now.
this is by design: the opposition usually get into power in midterms
and next presidency can swap parties, so if there is a bad provision
its moved out to "explode" when they aren't in power and hurt the
oppositions continuing chances
as an example, the cuts to medicade don't start until right after the
next midterms (which most are expecting to strongly favor democrats)
[0]
[0]
[1]: https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2025/05/27/medicaid-and-chip-cuts...
jayd16 wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
The unserious and corrupt are consistently rewarded with re-election.
I really have no idea how we move forward.
Sammi wrote 13 hours 50 min ago:
Get rid of the First Past the Post voting system. Almost all the
brokenness of US politics is downstream from FPTP. It incentivates
divisiveness instead of collaboration and consensus, which a better
voting system would.
sn9 wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
Divisiveness as well as strategically voting for the "lesser of
two evils" compared to voting for your ideal choice.
It should honestly be banned for any election and primary across
the country and be replaced with approval voting or Condorcet
methods or something else that are strict improvements.
kzrdude wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
It's a year of very rapid change. I just realized the other week
(naively) that we (non-US) should really be bracing even more than we
are. For shocks to come, economical, cultural as a reaction to the
slide towards an authoritarian presidential system.
It's not a time to be watching though, but to act.
kevin_thibedeau wrote 1 day ago:
Congress has transformed from a body of civil servants working toward
a common goal to a bunch of solipsist narcissists happy to burn
everything down for more face time in the beltway media echo chamber.
rendaw wrote 1 day ago:
There's something I didn't get about the discourse about this, maybe
someone can explain. The tax change greatly affected small
businesses/startups with unstable revenue, right? But companies like
Amazon, Google, etc are much more established companies with
diversivied, stable revenue and longer term planning I'd assume - so it
doesn't seem like this should have affected them as much.
The popular story currently is that the massive layoffs were due to the
tax/accounting change, but in that case why the big players like Amazon
etc have so many layoffs? Or is that the popular story because, while
Amazon etc are large, by total employee count most people are employed
at smaller business that were more affected by this?
Or was the FAANG stuff actually AI after all? The tax change story
sounds more plausible to me but I can't connect everything.
pm90 wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
Its a combination of factors. The end of ZIRP made raising money more
expensive and the tax change made hiring Software Engineers more
expensive. Small businesses faced existential challenges and cut
back, so now there was less demand from them. Then Big Tech realized
they needed to layoff to post better numbers to continue boosting
their stock (even though they made enough revenue) so started cutting
jobs.
With this change one of those factors has been eliminated, so we will
see startups/small businesses become a lot more competitive.
phtrivier wrote 1 day ago:
It was floated a few weeks ago they this tax break's disappearance was
responsible for mass lay offs in tech.
Other theory were AI and interest rates.
I'm pretty sure next rounds of layoffs will have another "good reason".
Personally, I'm still partial to my pet and hard to document theory of
"when headcounts go down, share prices go up - and past a certain size
and age, the goal of a massive corporation is not to build things any
more, but to pay for retirements through the resale / buybacks of
shares"
But, hey, BBB is singed, so everything will be awesome soon, I suppose
?
grumple wrote 1 day ago:
This tax issue (not a break - normally you can count employees as a
businesss expense for the current year, this made software unusual)
meant that startups or other tech companies were extremely
disadvantaged in the short term, and had to pay way more in taxes
than they should have. For startups, having to pay far more in taxes
during the first few years of existence is crippling.
This fixes that problem. That encourages both investment in software
and encourages software companies to hire.
empathy_m wrote 1 day ago:
Hey hey, maybe it will help job stability.
Gergely Orosz, whose writing is influential in tech spheres and fun
to read, has been a loud proponent of the theory that TCJA's
elimination of the immediate expense of R&D research cost was the
skeleton key explaining technology sector layoffs.
It seems to me to that many technology-industry trends are driven by
vibes:
* People seem to love reading articles in any kind of media source
about their company's products and are remarkably credulous of them /
influenced by their content. Not just PR generating roundup reports
of media coverage, this is also engineers and leaders who follow any
coverage of their firms quite closely.
* There really does seem to be a sort of contagion effect with
layoffs where, once one firm began doing it, everyone did
(layoffs.fyi has a lot of data supporting this kind of hypothesis)
* Among founders and engineering leaders, there does seem to be a
common set of ideas - not just the group-chat consensus that helped
kill SVB, but just an overall whisper network of facts that everyone
knows is true - which guide their choices.
Overall it seems reasonable for software-industry employees to hope a
narrative takes hold like "we had to lay off lots of people because
their headcount didn't pencil out during the annual FP&A cycle under
the new TCJA R&D rules, but now that the new law has restored
immediate R&D expensing the formula is going to make the opaque
headcount number higher, and jobs will be more stable". The idea
might even become true if enough people believe it.
Personally I think the layoffs are better explained by another
phenomenon, superpersuasion from AI. (My niche view is that the first
superpersuader success story was when the chatbots convinced business
leaders to reallocate resources to buying more GPUs and LLM tokens
and lower investment in the rest of their lines of business.)
CraigJPerry wrote 1 day ago:
Could this transfer enough money to mint a person as the first
trillionaire?
Econ 101: A government deficit increases the net financial worth of the
private sector.
The US usually increases the net financial worth of the private sector
by around $2tn per year, OBBB should move that to around $3tn per year
(CBO estimate [1] )
If you accumulate a dollar per second in net worth, then you become:
A millionaire in 11 days
A billionaire in 32 years
A trillionaire in 32,000 years
Obviously an indiscriminate increase in money without a corresponding
increase in output will show up in inflation.
So it's a wealth transfer, from those whose financial affairs will
remain comparatively static (your dollar will be worth less via
inflation) to those who can capture the new money streams.
[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61486
charlieyu1 wrote 1 day ago:
This bill is so random. The poker world is going doom and gloom when
BBB limits the amount of gambling loss deductibles to 90% of gambling
wins.
phtrivier wrote 1 day ago:
Remember when we software engineers painfully learned to _not_ do
massive releases with hundred of changes that are guaranteed to
create bugs ?
Well, imagine if instead we were _incentivized_ to create lots of
bugs in huge releases, because it helped us ship that one important
feature that the PM wanted in the middle of the garbage - and also,
that we were guaranteed never to have to debug the software ever, and
god forbid, to use it ?
archagon wrote 1 day ago:
Oh, goody!
Also, ICE has a bigger budget now than most of the world's
militaries[1]. But let's not talk about that.
[1]
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456
perihelions wrote 1 day ago:
That (initially) $175 billion/year will pay for itself in forced
labor. I think most countries with large-scale systems of
concentration camps converged on that solution, when the costs of
those systems ballooned into something unsustainable.
Modern China has that. Their system makes use of their (reportedly
millions) of incarcerated Uyghurs as low-skill forced labor, mainly
in textiles/clothes. Few talk about it, but a significant fraction of
Western clothing comes out of these camps.
The 1940's Germans were efficient: in extremis, they realized you
could optimize value from concentration camps by starving the workers
to death, extracting value from the final months of their lives with
minimal operating costs. That was "extermination through labor".
Hacker News, being what it is, will be most focused on the impact on
their 401k's. Their grandchildren will read these comments.
archagon wrote 14 hours 8 min ago:
The fact that this is downvoted is deeply disturbing. Timothy
Snyder has similar thoughts on concentration camp labor: [1]
Meanwhile, SV darling Curtis Yarvin is plainly insinuating that we
should bring slavery back: [2] What in the fuck is wrong with
people?
[1]: https://snyder.substack.com/p/concentration-camp-labor
[2]: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:gqqqg5xi4p2x4bfgphr7akip/...
lunar-whitey wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
It is important to understand that the methods selected for the
“Final Solution” were intended to minimize costs. It is
dangerous for crime at this scale to become cheap.
The experience of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland showed that mass
execution with guns used too much material and was too stressful
for the perpetrators. Camps allowed operational costs to be
amortized while individual responsibility was diffused.
saubeidl wrote 1 day ago:
An organization of goons who grab people off the street and disappear
them to concentration camps? Why does that sound so familiar?
Capitalists have always been involved in the rise of fascist
movements.
drstewart wrote 1 day ago:
>Why does that sound so familiar?
Probably because you've seen it repeated so much in your
hyper-propaganda bubble of reddit that you've started to believe it
myvoiceismypass wrote 1 day ago:
> Probably because you've seen it repeated so much in your
hyper-propaganda bubble of reddit that you've started to believe
it
I've seen it with my own eyes, no fucking thanks.
saubeidl wrote 1 day ago:
I am Austrian. My entire education was dedicated to the rise of
fascism and how it could happen and how to make sure it never
happens again.
I know what I'm seeing.
Don't believe me? What about subject matter experts that decided
to flee the country? [1] Or how about an excerpt from a book
written based on post-WW2 interviews of Germans? Does any of that
sound familiar at all? [2] > They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ …
‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.�…
[...]
> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or
thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the
difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had
come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes,
millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say,
the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the
‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in
’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between
come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them
imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by
the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you
did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so
on to Step D.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/yale-canada-f...
[2]: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
drstewart wrote 1 day ago:
> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seei…
things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
Ah, well in that case, it's clear to me Austria is actually the
one on the brink of fascism. It's clear to me, having
extensively eaten a lot of strudel (makes me an expert in
Austria), that it's now a fascist country.
And if you say: ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re …
things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’ then clearly you'…
just in denial.
batty_alex wrote 1 day ago:
Really grabbing at straws to dismiss the evidence of your
eyes and ears here, huh?
saubeidl wrote 1 day ago:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of
the absurdity of their replies. They know that their
remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are
amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is
obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in
words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even
like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous
reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their
interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since
they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to
intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely,
they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some
phrase that the time for argument is past." - Jean Paul
Sartre.
saubeidl wrote 1 day ago:
You've lost me. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here,
could you rephrase your point in a more coherent way please?
But also, yes, Austria was on the brink of fascism not too
long ago. Our far-right party almost got to form a government
and their plans were quite sinister.
Thankfully, disaster was averted due to egos and greed - the
far-right and center-right couldn't agree on who gets to
pilfer to country more, so they didn't end up forming a
coalition.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
This argument has a problem:
> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re …
things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
It provides no way to distinguish between when the thing is
happening and when it isn't. If people say you're an
alarmist, by what mechanism do you evaluate whether they're
correct?
dambi0 wrote 1 day ago:
Which is just as true of the argument
> Probably because you've seen it repeated so much in
your hyper-propaganda bubble of reddit that you've
started to believe it
AnthonyMouse wrote 17 hours 22 min ago:
Except that argument admits a means to evaluate it. You
take the thing repeated ad nauseam and subject it to an
evidentiary requirement. Are people actually being held
without habeas corpus? Are people actually being
executed based on their ethnicity? If anything in this
nature is happening, has the rate of it significantly
increased recently or has it been going on for decades?
The last question is pretty important if your argument
is "Trump is a fascist and all we have to do is get him
out", because then that argument is erroneous and you
have to actually change the status quo instead of
returning to it.
saubeidl wrote 1 day ago:
And that is exactly the mechanism through which fascist
regimes keep resistance down and dissenters in a state of
self-doubt.
People like the guy accusing me of being
"hyper-propagandized" knowingly weaponize this
uncertainty to become willing enablers.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
You didn't actually answer the question.
It's like making the argument that denying an
accusation is evidence that it's true. It's rubbish
because people would also deny it if it was false.
FirmwareBurner wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
>You didn't actually answer the question.
He never does. If you go through his comment history
all he does is shill for Germany and EU how they're
the best, and shit on Trump and the US how they're
the worst and that's it. He never has any arguments
beyond appeals to emotional manipulation of "look at
the fascists" based on fake or one sided articles.
Best treat him as a troll.
drstewart wrote 1 day ago:
Your entire argument boils to the fact that you live in
Austria and that makes you an expert on fascism and if
anyone tries to refute you then it immediately means
they're in denial.
Which is, of course, non-sensical.
dambi0 wrote 1 day ago:
That isn't true at all. Some of the argument relies on
the experience of an Austrian education, but we are also
encouraged to refer to other provided sources if we
choose to seek other opinions.
squarefoot wrote 1 day ago:
Italian here, and I know a few things about fascism not
just because of that. Yes, what is happening in the US is
the rise of a fascist state controlled by a small
minority of very wealthy and powerful people purely for
economical reasons with Trump being just a tool in their
hands. As with happened in my country back then, there
are only two possible reasons for endorsing it: being
part of the cult, or being part of the club.
That's why I stopped long ago any attempt at reasoning
with apologists.
drstewart wrote 13 min ago:
Your nationality is not a credential, I don't know why
Europeans can't understand this.
saubeidl wrote 1 day ago:
I never said I live in Austria. I don't. But having grown
up in Austria, the rise of fascism was the major theme of
my entire education.
xvector wrote 1 day ago:
Thank jeebus.
me551ah wrote 1 day ago:
I doubt if this will make much difference. Offshoring as a tactic
emerged in the pandemic when companies realised that being “remote”
works just as well.
Sure, foreign R&D still gets amortized over 15 years (NPV ≈59 % of a
full write-off, so you “lose” ~8.6 % of your R&D spend in
present-value terms, and only 6.7 % of the cost is deductible in year
1, creating a 19.6 % cash-tax gap).
But offshore wages are often 50–70 % below U.S. rates:
• Even after the slower amortization drag, hiring at half the cost
nets you ~30 % total savings on R&D headcount.
• On a pure cash basis you only need ~20 % lower wages to break even;
most offshore markets easily exceed that.
• So the labor-cost arbitrage far outweighs the tax timing penalty
unless your foreign salaries are less than ~20 % below U.S. levels.
In short: the 15-year amort rule hurts your tax deduction, but 50 %+
lower offshore wages more than make up for it.
dimal wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
Won’t make much of a difference? To what?You’re only talking
about whether to offshore or not. Not whether to HIRE or not.
Many companies simply won’t offshore core functions because doing
product development on your core product with a team in a different
time zone or from a very different culture often doesn’t work. But
this will matter to companies that have laid off US engineers or
avoided hiring and now won’t have that extra tax burden.
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
> Offshoring as a tactic emerged in the pandemic when companies
realised that being “remote” works just as well.
I am confused by this comment. Offshoring IT work to India has been
going on since the early 2000s. The established model at many non
tech companies is a few people onshore talking with biz stakeholders,
then directing offshore staff.
bsenftner wrote 1 day ago:
Since I 90's, I remember it.
FartinMowler wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
Yup, lots of Y2K work shipped offshore in the 90s while onshore
worked on the web boom. After Jan 1, 2000, mgmt thought, hey, how
can I use these cheap guys elsewhere.
bravesoul2 wrote 1 day ago:
Not convinced. Offshore has been possible since forever. Maybe IC cam
be remote now. Your team can be global. US lead, 2 India based devs,
2 brazil devs. But not having this wasn't a blocker for saving money.
10, 100 or 500 people team in India who could work in the office
together was possible forever.
It will change. I think once other countries become bigger investment
centres. Not sure how yet though. US is a good potting soil for a
startup because there is this huge addressable and free market. And
the startup ecosystem. Then add in that most startups want WFO and
minimum synced time zones... and for larger tech all that specialism
is in house in the US.
g0db1t wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, there's simply a lot of 'Muricans thinking programming and
software dev. for some reason only can be done inside of the US.
As a EU senior dev I know zero senior devs making six figures pa -
Go figure
kevin_thibedeau wrote 1 day ago:
Six figures isn't special in the US for skilled tech workers. My
starting salary as a college grad 25 years ago was an
unremarkable $55K when dotcoms were slinging six figure salaries
and options. That is now $102K.
CalRobert wrote 1 day ago:
It's not the heady days of 2022 but six figures shouldn't be
impossible for someone with 10+ years of experience. But the
trick is to (mostly) ignore the European companies and go for the
American ones operating in Europe. Switzerland, Norway, and
Ireland can be decent too.
I'm still stunned when I see what devs are paid in Germany and
southern Europe though.
FirmwareBurner wrote 1 day ago:
>I'm still stunned when I see what devs are paid in Germany and
southern Europe though.
Are German wages really low? I thought Germany as the richest
country in Europe.
okanat wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
Usually one earns half to a third of net wage in Germany
compared to East Coast US. A maximum of 100k total cash
compensation is usually the norm for mid-size companies. That
is for the most senior engineers. It is also taxed almost at
50%.
FirmwareBurner wrote 12 hours 49 min ago:
Isn't that the norm everywhere in Europe?
CalRobert wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
Lots of countries are lower, especially in southern
Europe.
okanat wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
Isn't what the norm? Europe is not the US. Each country
has its own living standards and completely different tax
laws. EU doesn't unify them. In Switzerland one pays much
less tax. In Netherlands it is possible to get 30% tax
break if you haven't lived there for more than 5 years.
Both the Netherlands and Switzerland pay higher wages
too.
CalRobert wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
They seem much lower than, say, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway,
etc. Eastern and southern Europe are low but also lower cost
of living. A fraction of the US regardless.
FirmwareBurner wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
I think you're only looking at big tech wages when you
compare with Ireland. Norway doesn't have much of a tech
industry.
disgruntledphd2 wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
Yeah but there's lots and lots of no big tech US
companies in Ireland. They generally don't have much
equity or bonuses but the base is OK. I got 6 figures
from a bunch of them in Ireland so it's possible.
FirmwareBurner wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
How much of that wage is left after taxes and Dublin
housing?
disgruntledphd2 wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Feck all, unfortunately. Like, if you either 1. buy a
house some years back or 2. get an off-books rental
through someone you know then you can do well.
Alternatively, if you work for one of the Big Tech
places then you'll get a really good wage (by irish
standards) as well as enough benefits to make you
feel a bunch better off. Additionally the bonuses and
equity there help a lot.
But yeah, Ireland's super expensive. Our household is
at about the 85% percentile income, and we have a
(small/expensive) house but we don't have a lot left
after all of our outgoings.
So yeah, you can get a better salary but you probably
won't have a whole lot more disposable income (but
apart from all that, ireland's a great place to
live).
CalRobert wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
Yeah, we tried to hack this by buying a cheap place
in Offaly near the train and working remote, and it
was kinda-sorta OK except that our neighbours were
hell on Earth. Gave up and moved to the Netherlands
which has been great for our kids' independence.
I do miss a good snug though.
bravesoul2 wrote 1 day ago:
I think there is game theory at play. I don't think Google for
example is leaving money on the table. They hire worldwide of
course but they are not swapping US for cheaper countries on mass
and it must be for a good reason. Maybe it's a missed opportunity
and some YC company dominates the new arbitrage. Who knows! I
think I like the soil analogy. Moving the palm tree to another
spot is risky if it's doing well in its current soil.
eru wrote 1 day ago:
> Offshoring as a tactic emerged in the pandemic when companies
realised that being “remote” works just as well.
Offshoring is far older than the pandemic.
ozgrakkurt wrote 1 day ago:
It is delusional to think you get same quality work for 70% less
price.
klabb3 wrote 1 day ago:
If you work at FAANG and relocate from NYC/SF to a smaller
satellite office within the US, you can take a large pay cut.
Unless things have changed in the last few years, companies usually
pay location-based market rate. The lines are blurred with remote
work - which market are you really a part of? But there is nothing
magical that separates within the US from outside.
ozgrakkurt wrote 1 day ago:
Top engineers move to best pay location. For example best
engineers in europe etc. move to US or get similarly high
salaries in Europe. And having more high talent people in a
location creates a different culture.
There is ofc some difference but if you are taking averages you
will have much better engineers in a company based in nyc vs
berlin.
I’m not an expert but this has been very apparent in places I
worked, US based companies just had a better work setup and
everything moved faster and with higher quality.
As an example, just saying an engineer is quarter the price in
Turkey so you can just outsource there is very foolish. It just
doesn’t work that way, maybe in wet dreams of CEOs only.
Similar thing with LLMs, some people are salivating over how they
won’t need developers but it just isn’t that way yet.
Seeing how hungry businesses are for outsourcing and hiring
remote, and seeing how it isn’t really working that way should
be concrete proof for this.
whatevaa wrote 1 day ago:
It is not when ir comes to wages. People in other continent aren't
dumb, the overall wages are just lower.
whatshisface wrote 1 day ago:
It's not possible, really, to believe that markets are inefficient
enough to pay twice the price for something in one place as
another...
PaulDavisThe1st wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
In all likelihood you lived through 2008, and yet you continue to
believe that market "efficiency" is somehow a builtin immutable
property of particular trading rules?
eric-burel wrote 1 day ago:
If I read properly this is explicitely targeting UE, Canada, UK and
other countries with high wages and R&D and software engineering
capabilities.
tossandthrow wrote 1 day ago:
Yep, seems like this is an opaque tarrif.
Other countries should use this when retaliating.
munch117 wrote 1 day ago:
If I'm understanding this correctly then this is about a tax
disincentive, making it more expensive for US companies to poach
R&D talent from other countries.
Not all countries will see that as a problem.
tossandthrow wrote 1 day ago:
The current administration is making a huge fuss out of VAT in
Europe.
MangoToupe wrote 1 day ago:
Sadly, not to adopt such a sane taxation method....
jandrewrogers wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
That isn't really possible because American Constitution
expressly prohibits it. There is no realistic possibility
of modifying the Constitution to allow it either.
As far as the US Federal government is concerned it has
little practical relevance.
tossandthrow wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
No, lol! That would hamper the USs strongest asset:
consumption!
which is likely being hampered anyways due to corporate
greed in the financial sector - it is going to be
interesting to see the actual breaking point for leveraged
consumption
BobbyJo wrote 1 day ago:
This ignores the other financial and non-financial costs of
offshoring: legal, cultural, temporal... a lot of the time, those
close the gap.
On paper, offshoring has made sense the entire time, and yet here we
are in 2025 and companies still hire American devs. Not only that,
they often fly in foreign devs just to pay them more here than if
they had just offshored to their home country.
cbg0 wrote 1 day ago:
It also has to do with how the companies handle the offshoring, as
some larger corporations take the approach of just using an
outsourcing company from a specific country (usually chosen by
price) and assume that you can just pay a specific amount of money
per developer and they will all be the same quality as the guys
coming into the office.
I've worked most of my career as a remote employee and I can say
that the best arrangement is when the company is as involved in
hiring offshore employees as they are with hiring onshore ones.
Someone working through an intermediary will always be disconnected
from the company's success, as they work for an outsourcing
company, and not the US corporation itself.
There are definitely a lot of discussions to be had around employee
cultural fit, and I don't just mean company culture. You want a
similar mindset and work ethic that your other employees have if
you want a high chance of success.
We also need to talk about how some companies haven't been able to
successfully adapt their processes to work with remote employees
alongside the office employees and sometimes treat the offshore
ones as second class citizens, which is not really a great thing.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
In addition to this, those factors contribute varying amounts to
the total in any given case. So you also can't make the case that
offshoring never makes sense, because in specific cases it does.
But now there is a ~20% incentive for it to make sense in fewer
cases.
xlii wrote 1 day ago:
I have approx. 15 years of experience working remotely for various
companies all across the globe and was always an advocate of thesis
that remote work is difficult and most people aren’t cut for it
and (to horror of many proponents) and on average are less
efficient than on-site hires.
There are many reasons: It’s difficult to understand _intention_
when deprived of non-verbal communication and working in a choppy
network call. Even if one can gloss over communication needs etc.
there’s burnout looming around the corner and natural, healthy
laziness getting into the way. Sometimes even internal politics
might be blocking knowledge/access/contribution for more or less
peculiar reasons.
It’s not like it’s impossible to hire remote engineer, yet my
(completely unmetered) estimates out of experience is that approx.
10% of engineers willing to work remotely can sustain health
(physical and mental) and be efficient outside of 1-2 years of
honeymoon period.
There was some tumbling around COVID but IMO both stationary jobs
and remote ones are doing well on mid-high quality positions.
varispeed wrote 17 hours 6 min ago:
The idea of coming to office comes from the fact it was not
practical for people to have computers and other devices at home.
Now we have technology that this is no longer necessary, but of
course commercial landlords and investors feel salty about it, so
they lobby for this outdated now model to keep their investments
artificially up.
phil21 wrote 17 hours 59 min ago:
I have nearly 3 decades (ugh…) now of forming fully remote
startups and working remotely.
It used to be totally non-controversial and completely validated
by direct personal experience that only a minority of the
population is built to work remotely. It’s so silly this is
even an argument when our entire society and education is built
on in-person interactions.
I think the 10% number is variable depending on the org you are
hiring into. A company that was never built to be remote or put
any thought into how information and communication systems must
be different than office? 10% may even be high. A company built
from first principles with lots of thought and intentional design
behind business processes being remote only? Probably much too
low. It will be reflected even in the types of personalities
being hired on average.
If you reach for video calls as a solution to your remote
companies communication issues you have completely failed and
probably would be better served with fully on-premise. This
would be the first question I would ask as an interviewee for a
remote role. Any company regularly engaging or encouraging this
means leadership is simply trying in the worst possible way to
recreate an office environment and thus you can expect nearly
everything else process based to be horribly broken for a remote
company. I have some other “tells” as well, but this one
stands out as the simplest as it displays a total disconnect with
the reality of how to build remote teams. If you can’t
function like a well ran open source project you are almost
assuredly doing it wrong.
xlii wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
I read, wanted to reply but would only echo what you wrote.
100% agree.
Just a note that my 10% experience is based on general
population of people who were working remotely for at least 6
months (and being a contractor I’ve switched orgs more often
than average engineer)
Zacharias030 wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
100% agree with you both and I love the litmus tests
mentioned!
Looks like big and small tech are mostly doing things wrong
then?
UltraSane wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
When I have had 100% remote work jobs one think I have noticed
that when I get into the "zone" and am being very productive
having to go home doesn't interrupt it and I can keep being very
productive for many more hours. Then I can slack off the next day
if I want to.
sidewndr46 wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
If management is so poor that they can't communicate intention in
writing, then I don't really see how being in office or anywhere
for that matter will help. They're just flat out incompetent.
I've seen the opposite of this as well, where whatever management
clearly communicated is most definitely not what is going to get
executed.
If internal politics are blocking knowledge, access, &
contribution of any employee the correct action is not to hire
them. If they are already hired, the correct action of management
is to offer them severance.
My experience working in software startups is that the average
retention period of an employee is 2 years, in any work
environment. What you're calling the honeymoon period is
effectively just the average retention of the industry anyways.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
I think you're glossing a bit over the word "intention". It's
certainly easy for any competent manager to communicate
instructions or requirements in writing. What's hard is
communicating the full scope of their intentions, including
things like:
* This bit is confusing to me even as I say it - I want to keep
it in mind as we move forwards in case we're thinking about it
wrong.
* This requirement is really annoying and I'd love to find a
way to get rid of it.
* This part is super super urgent, and if we find a way to do
it faster without too many other costs we should rework the
plan.
You can't "just" write these things down, both because some
requirements aren't so annoying you can come out and explicitly
say it and because too many parenthetical clauses start to
make a document impossible to read. If they're not communicated
nonverbally it's hard to communicate them at all.
whatshisface wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
The big issue is that companies are indeed poor in so many
ways, and all they have to fix it with is money, and sometimes
not even that.
charlie0 wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
I wonder if that's because at the 2 year mark, people get a lot
more responsibility, but no pay increases to compensate.
CalRobert wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of companies just suck at it too. "Here's Slack, figure it
out" seems to be a common approach. In person you can pester the
person next to you when you're new, overhear conversations, etc.
but remote it is MUCH harder to ascertain the culture, Slack
etiquette, etc (my favourite was "people write in Slack all the
time, in public, even to themselves, it's your job to mute Slack
when you need focus, and don't use DM's unless you really need
the privacy"), but I have only seen this done very well in one
place - Auth0 (pour one out :-( ) . Maybe because it started
remote with founders thousands of KM apart.
xlii wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
I agree.
Rarely companies want to hire communication expert to help
shape good practices even though they’re spending hundreds of
thousands if not millions on stuff like Datadog etc.
I have this theory that mailing lists with rich search (slash
Google Groups slash Newsgroups) are the best communication
tools.
Hadn’t had opportunity to try it out though, as it was
shunned „old tech”.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 18 hours 43 min ago:
Ehh, IME companies are hesitant because it's not a free
parameter. All of your internal processes are built on top of
how people communicate, so you can't change it without
changing the entirety of how work gets done. People routinely
hire experts for external comms, manager training, etc.
because those are easier to adjust in isolation.
PeterStuer wrote 1 day ago:
From experience I think your 10% feels overly pessimistic. 30-40%
feels more accurate, just like only about the same % that can
survive an open plan or cubicle floor.
I see lots of people thriving in remote. Main reasons being a
huge increase in quality of life. Regaining 2-3 hours of
senseless commuting time per day, getting small household chores
done over lunch, not having to schedule repair and maintainance
appointments in the weekends etc. is huge.
Now I do agree it is not for everyone. I see especially younger
people living alone not coping to well. Part of the reason is
they (ab)used the office as a socializing place, and are not used
to organizing a personal social life outside work. There's also
people that don't actually have much work outside of attending
office meetings, and nobody thrives sitting in Teams calls all
day.
Then there's also real downsides. Some people living in shoebox
appartments in the city just do not have the space. W
While work can be done (more?) efficiently remote, but carreer
climbing needs in person contact. It's like dating. Real dinner
or a video call? No comparison.
Best of both worlds would be 0 commute time to a luxurious
private office inside the company premises. All the rest will be
tradeoffs and compromises either way.
jayd16 wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
So the problem with this reply is you talk about thriving and
then list personal benefits. Those are not thriving in the
workplace that companies are looking for.
xlii wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
I can’t disclose details but I’ve been doing mentoring,
screening and interviewing + screening for years and saw remote
communities grow from 10s to 1000s.
What you’re saying is true especially in the honeymoon phase,
but the running joke is that you don’t really live remote
life unless solitude made you name a pigeon. I’ve seen
careers of many of my peers and usually 5 years in people
starts to seek on-site.
There’s another point to take into consideration though. In
Europe commute is usually less than hour and for many morning
routine is an opening to watch movies/read books/listen to
music or podcasts. Some travel with friends so that’s a
social occasion too. Given accounts of my US colleagues where
it’s usually lone drive back and forth experience is
different.
Yet remote means omitting or social events and being outsider
in the most-social environment (especially for men). Even
hybrid with one day is much better than completely remote.
What I found over the years is that no one can say what
differentiates remote-able to non-remote. Quiet back-seat
engineer can get depressed after year of remote and that guy
who is always heart of the party can thrive in remote. It’s
just… it wears people down quickly and problems are usually
creeping. Back pains coming from tension. Working hours slowly
inflating to compensate for extra 10 minutes spent on lunch,
this one time when you are bored at 8pm because you are bored
in front of computer so why not help someone.
Maybe I’m biased but I find situation that some people are
remote and some aren’t to be a healthy one. This preserves
local jobs while also making an opening for those who want to
do remote work for any reason whatsoever. And this honeymoon
period is good to check out if you’re fit for remote or not
(and gives enough churn to provide opportunity to try).
JumpCrisscross wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
> unless solitude made you name a pigeon
This is kind of hilarious because I moved to Wyoming a few
years ago and have recently started naming the magpies.
HerrMonnezza wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
Interesting remarks, thanks!
When discussing remote vs non-remote with a colleague some
time ago over lunch, he mentioned that "remote is an extreme
version of yourself", so those inclined to slack off will
slack off way more to the point of being unproductive, and
those inclined to work longer hours will eventually just
spend all their time working... Maybe over-simplified but I
think he was onto something.
acedTrex wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
I think it is really the commute that makes or breaks the
office. My commute is 40 mins there and if I leave after 4pm
itll take me an hour 15 to an hour 30 to get home. All in
bumper to bumper standstill traffic
__loam wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah people have been offshoring then onshoring once they realize
offshoring sucks since at least the 90s. I remember my dad, who was
also a software dev, complaining about it 20 years ago. It always
swings back. The network effect in huge hubs like SF and NYC is
massive.
fnordpiglet wrote 1 day ago:
I’ve been a part of the entire arc of offshored teams since the
trend started in the late 90’s early 00’s. I’ve never seen
it work. The primary issue is and always has been time zone
related. While it doesn’t show to an accountant we do live on a
sphere and there are implications to everyone. The solution is
always to find some self contained effort for the remote centers
but it never works because the entire company is pulling together
and short of making the remote teams spin offs there’s no way
to disentangle dependencies. And at some level even if you could
management has to work cross regionally which isolates them from
their center of power in the home office time zone. The root is
the company is asking you to make immense personal sacrifice so
they can save money if the model were to work. There is no upside
to anyone other than the remote management in this situation so
they burn out quickly and still fail because literally no one
else in the company cares in any meaningful way. It’s unfair at
its core and therefore fails.
The issues of quality and whatnot are at their core racist IMO
but are made real because of the timezone issue. The norms and
culture expected in the home time zones don’t translate easily
and result in an impedance mismatch and a different measure of
“good.” Because the remote team is isolated and unempowered
they always struggle to adopt the standard of the team and to
some extent can’t ever succeed in the quality space as it’ll
be an ever shifting goalpost whose reasoning is effectively
hidden. Then layer in the latent resentment on both sides and
the whole situation is bound to fail, but the home teams have the
advantage of being resident with the only management that
matters.
I wish everyone involved would realize the experiment has failed.
But CFOs are too powerful in most companies large enough to
reasonably pull off outsourcing at all and the need for the CEO
to please boards and investors who just operating off the
financial statements and HBR white papers are too disconnected
for why these efforts fail.
Unfortunately the current persecution of immigrants in the US
will drive these arrangements more and more. Rather than on
shoring local foreign talent with the collocated team, foreign
talent will opt to avoid the fear society being birthed. This
will lead to a strong incentive to follow talent to their home
country leading to more imbalance in talent disoriented time
zones. Maybe this would require everyone to figure out the above
issues but I seriously doubt it. I think it’ll just make
everyone less effective and not achieve anything positive for
anyone.
CalRobert wrote 1 day ago:
It seems like more American companies are noticing that Latin
America has lots of intelligent, clever people who produce good
work, and cost less. I have worked with a lot of Argentinians
and really enjoyed it.
I'm in Europe now and it definitely is easier to set up calls
with my South African colleagues than the American ones.
fnordpiglet wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
Yes I’ve done some excellent work with teams in Brazil.
__loam wrote 1 day ago:
One of the most insightful comments I've seen on this site.
BobbyJo wrote 1 day ago:
100%. Most of the planet is cheaper than the US, and has been for
decades. That being the case, how are there so many knowledge
workers here still?
Tade0 wrote 1 day ago:
Hailing from an outsourcing destination I think I need to state
the obvious: there exist IT jobs outside the US.
Americans have a... distinct work culture and companies - local
and foreign - are not stupid, so nowadays they aim for the
50-75 percentile in terms of compensation.
On top of that you absolutely need to be fluent in English,
which disqualifies half the candidates right off the bat.
All this combined makes it not obvious whether one would want
to/could work for an American company - particularly if it's
through various middlemen.
US used to be 100% worth it, but over the course of the last 25
years the ratio of GDPs per capita between USA and my country
fell from 5.5 to around 3.75 and compensation naturally
followed.
Lastly, the dollar fell 15% since the start of 2025 against my
country's currency and that has had an effect on available
openings.
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
> Americans have a... distinct work culture
That is a mighty wide brush to paint your generalisation. Do
Brazilians or South Africans or Sri Lankans also have
"distinct work culture"? I assume yes. Not much being said
there.
Another way to look at it: If your country was much richer
than the US the model would be flipped. Do you think
Americans would post a similar generalisation here? Yep.
Not much being said.
root_axis wrote 1 day ago:
I believe the impact of Section 174 has been vastly overstated, sadly
we will soon observe this to be the case.
cheema33 wrote 1 day ago:
Nobody at my work knew anything about it. And we do have software
engineers. I suspect only the very large orgs with expensive
accountants were complying. And pay now vs later thing didn't really
matter that much to them anyway.
greenchair wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
yep it is definitely a big deal for f500. lots of creative
accounting techniques had to be used in the meantime.
BobbyJo wrote 1 day ago:
What do you base that belief on?
autobodie wrote 1 day ago:
I would assume they think the cause of the layoffs was more related
to the non-zero interest rate.
doctorpangloss wrote 1 day ago:
Well who the hell was complying anyway?
nashashmi wrote 1 day ago:
This was the expense that was removed in the first Trump tax bill.
Amazing how it takes another super tax bill just to get it through
0xbadcafebee wrote 1 day ago:
The elimination of green energy incentives is going to have a big
negative effect on the economy. Those billions of dollars not only were
going to new businesses and jobs, but they were joined with loans from
banks and commitments from customers with the expectation that the
government would be funding the remainder. This means private industry
and banks will be shouldering the loss of hundreds of billions of
dollars, which, as any astute person should know by now, later gets
shouldered by the average citizen in rate hikes, stock market plunges,
increased inflation, etc. There goes your job and 401k and here comes
more expensive products.
Aside from the direct negative effects: we lose even more to foreign
countries who now have even more runway to gain expertise in green
energy and sell to everyone else investing in it. Nobody but the 3rd
world is increasing investments in coal/oil and there's no money we
could make there anyway. So there goes any money we could've made on
energy internationally.
Either this country is intentionally being tanked, or we're in the
stupidest timeline.
jimmydorry wrote 1 day ago:
The largest competitor to US renewables, would be China. They have
been rolling back their subsidies for years. [1] China, India,
Russia, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia (off the top of my
head, and a quick google to add a few I missed [2]) have all
increased investments into coal since 2020.
The renewable industry in the US was wrought with companies seizing
as many renewable credits and subsidies as they can, while providing
as little as possible to show for them. If this moves the industry as
a whole to focus on projects that are not just marginal at best, we
should start to see better traction on projects that actually matter.
We have long been told that renewables are cheaper in every way that
matters, so let's see the economics of that play out. [1]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-roll-back-clea...
[2]: https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-repla...
0xbadcafebee wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
> We have long been told that renewables are cheaper in every way
that matters, so let's see the economics of that play out.
Renewables are cheaper now than they used to be. Why? The same
reason anything is cheaper the longer you make it: technological
improvement, economies of scale, production efficiency, increased #
customers, reduced capex, amortized r&d, etc.
"the economics of that" aren't black and white. Just because
something is expensive today doesn't mean it will be expensive
tomorrow. But if something cheaper exists today, and nobody invests
in the expensive thing (because "the market" doesn't see immediate
cash gains in it), then the expensive thing never has the
opportunity to become cheap.
> The renewable industry in the US was wrought with companies
seizing as many renewable credits and subsidies as they can, while
providing as little as possible to show for them.
The "show" is long-term. That's the whole point of all green
energy: it's expensive at the beginning, and then becomes
increasingly cheaper over time, to the point you start saving
money, and then you keep saving money. But to ever get to that
point, you have to invest big at the start. That's what the
subsidies are for!
China has a massive and cheap labor force and decades of
manufacturing expertise. That makes their products/services cheap
and advanced. Unless we literally take over Mexico, we don't have
the labor. And unless we start investing now, we'll never have the
expertise. Without subsidies, we will never get on renewables, and
we will always pay more for energy. Since the whole future of the
world is dependent on energy, it might be a good idea for us to
invest in it!
wraptile wrote 1 day ago:
China has been rolling back subsidies because they won solar
panels. No other country is even remotely close to market strength
as China here and obviously for Chinese it makes sense to reduce
incentives but does that make sense for the US which has 1% of this
market power?
> Between January and May, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of
wind, enough to generate as much electricity as Indonesia or Turkey
[1] 1 -
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks...
nandomrumber wrote 1 day ago:
What evidence is there of governments being more successful at
picking winners than the market?
Governments should stay out of the winner-picking business, which
they do with money from the public purse, and allow individuals and
enterprise to use their own money to have a go at picking winners
themselves.
If industry and banks find investment in any particular field
unpalatable without Government incentive, then those investments were
unpalatable to start with.
Industry and banks will find something better to do with their money.
raverbashing wrote 1 day ago:
Cool, cut all the oil subsidies, and road subsidies, and let the
market decide
nandomrumber wrote 1 day ago:
Did you know if you run a business (carry on an enterprise) the
majority of the costs of doing business are tax deductible.
That's another term subsidised.
I'd argue fossil fuel industry subsidies are a net benefit to
society as they help enable cheap reliable energy.
Whereas renewable subsidies are a net negative because they
don't. Everywhere more renewables have gone electricity has
become more expensive and less reliable, completely antithetical
to strong industrial development.
Also, renewables seem to be driven forward largely due to a
psychological contagion that a climate apocalypse is nigh, which
is turning out to be completely toxic, especially to the minds of
the next generations.
tired-turtle wrote 1 day ago:
> Everywhere more renewables have gone electricity has become
more expensive and less reliable, completely antithetical to
strong industrial development.
Have you heard of Washington state? 75% renewable energy and
10th percentile for the cost per kWh.
jandrewrogers wrote 1 day ago:
Washington is a bit of a special case given that most of
their electricity comes from vast hydroelectric resources
constructed almost a century ago. That situation doesn’t
generalize to other places. It is disingenuous to imply that
this is an example relevant to modern energy policy.
jnfno wrote 1 day ago:
What evidence is there those with capital/the market are making the
best engineering and science based decisions and not just juicing
their portfolio because they’ll be dead when shit hits the fan?
nandomrumber wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
People have children they might care about.
Governments don’t.
ChromaticPanic wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't a game so it's not about picking winners. It's about
steering the economy so local businesses get an advantage over
foreign entities.
nandomrumber wrote 1 day ago:
By all means, have government get out of the way so the economy
can get on with it.
I'm more in favour of tax incentivised encouragement, lowering
the barriers to entry, and more so when there are proven benefits
to the economy and society, and less in favour of government
backed loans and direct cash injection.
jaybrendansmith wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, I'll bite. Will they invest in more coal and gas instead? And
help cook the planet? You post as if you don't know what it's
about, but of course you do. Disingenuous and contemptible.
sp527 wrote 1 day ago:
Any green energy project that isn't nuclear is a waste of money and
resources. Nuclear is now being pursued in earnest by the tech
industry itself. There's no problem here.
cbg0 wrote 1 day ago:
I suspect that in the US nuclear is being pursued by the tech
industry due to the current administration, if Biden were still in
the White House, the tech industry would be pushing for offshore
wind and solar panels.
Nuclear is expensive and requires red tape and a long time to bring
online, but the real benefit is that it can deliver power
consistently all day, unlike wind and solar. I think the ideal
future includes all of these plus better storage capabilities.
saubeidl wrote 1 day ago:
Nuclear is by far more expensive than other green options.
SoftTalker wrote 19 hours 29 min ago:
It has been historically, but must it be?
cheema33 wrote 1 day ago:
> Any green energy project that isn't nuclear is a waste of money
and resources.
Nuclear's cost/megawatt is significantly higher than most other
options. If anybody is reaching for nuclear it is because they are
using up all available capacity through other means. Nobody picks
nuclear for cost reasons.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
Data centers are a pretty good match for nuclear because they run
24/7 and use a fairly constant amount of power. Solar is cheap in
terms of amortized price per kWh but then you need some other
solution to supply power at night or when it's cloudy, and the
price of that has to be paid on top of the cost of solar.
Meanwhile nuclear costs what it does in significant part because
the number of new plants is low which requires the cost of
designing new reactors etc. to be amortized over fewer plants.
But if you build more of them that changes.
jofzar wrote 1 day ago:
So this is going to get all those jobs back that people have been layed
off for right? Right?
nine_k wrote 1 day ago:
Hiring software engineers is going to become less expensive. So
likely there's going to be more jobs on the market, and maybe better
jobs.
But when a forest is cut, usually a new forest that grows on that
place looks different.
coliveira wrote 1 day ago:
Of course not.
supportengineer wrote 1 day ago:
Reversion to the mean
ttul wrote 1 day ago:
Meanwhile, in Canada, not only can you expense R&D, but there is a
cashable tax refund that will give you back about 60% of your
developers’ salaries…
llm_nerd wrote 23 hours 32 min ago:
It's 35% of eligible spend on up to $3 million, and 15% above that
(15% and 15% if the corporation is not Canadian). Further, most
software development simply doesn't qualify- [1] If you're making
websites or doing Shopify integrations, etc, that doesn't actually
qualify.
Something truly novel in AI or self driving or whatever -- sure.
[1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/scientific-...
ttul wrote 17 hours 37 min ago:
This is a naive perspective. In reality, most of the software
development that a typical growth company does is eligible. As one
of CRA’s auditors once told me, “The general arc of your
development has to meet the criteria of being technically
challenging and uncertain, and you have to follow a generally
scientific approach, measuring your results empirically. But if you
need a web console to help with that, who are we to say that’s
not eligible support work?”
llm_nerd wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
>This is a naive perspective.
Okay.
SR&ED had 22,758 applications last year. Software development
only accounted for 40% of it. So 9000 applications from software
dev firms, the majority being very small firms. That is a tiny,
tiny minority of software firms in this country.
>In reality, most of the software development that a typical
growth company does is eligible
No, it absolutely is not, unless you are lying on the
application. And yes, a lot of people lie to get government
grants and subsidies. And it works out pretty good until someone
audits it and realizes that someone is making a shitty
instrumentation console that absolutely no one would say advances
scientific knowledge and demands the credit back plus interest
and penalties.
And yes, I've seen people's absolute bullshit SR&ED applications
before. I've had peers ask me to review theirs, where they do bog
standard bullshit dev but read on HN how super easy it is, and
they convince themselves that "everyone is doing it". Only those
signatures on the form that lies about what is actually being
claimed.
Again, it's awesome...until it isn't. Which is why the vast
majority of software firms are not claiming this.
veeti wrote 1 day ago:
Meanwhile in one of the world's higest taxed welfare states, where
you absolutely can deduct 100% of SW developer salaries I feel I've
been taking crazy pills every time reading these threads. It's almost
as if some folks in """Hacker""" News wanted this law to stay to
further cement gigantic incumbents and make it impossible for
bootstrapped companies to compete.
Galanwe wrote 1 day ago:
There is something similar in France, the Crédit Impôts Recherche
(CIR), I remember it was around 50%. I've heard it's going to
disappear though, there were abuses.
huhkerrf wrote 1 day ago:
It's also capricious. I've been in companies doing legitimate r&d
who would spend man months preparing for the CIR only to get it
rejected, while they got it in previous years for much less
interesting work.
forty wrote 1 day ago:
"There are abuses" is really an understatement. "It's mostly abuse
and there might be some legitimate beneficiaries" would be more
correct.
eric-burel wrote 1 day ago:
It's hackernews, not Elon Musk's X or the French parliament,
please bring sources and precise details.
forty wrote 1 day ago:
It's quite common knowledge :) if you want journalist material,
I think there was a Cash Investigation on the topic a few years
ago.
I have discussed this topic with many other engineers (known
from engineering school, from working 13+ years in the Paris
tech startup ecosystem and from my worker union, whose scope
include most tech companies) and I have never heard any of them
saying they did not write bullshit CIR reports for bullshit
projects. I have myself written my fair share of those bullshit
reports. There are even companies whose business is to write
the bullshit reports for you in exchange for x% of your CIR
credit. I worked with such company.
eric-burel wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
My experience is different, so far I've defended R&D that I
believed to be eligible to tax credits, in order for
companies to be competitive with other countries that also
subsidize R&D and innovation, namely USA and Canada.
You can't generalize a 7 billion tax cut system based on one
journalist work (the same and the same is quoted again...),
opinions based on a few rotten fruits in the basket, and an
anti-startup trend that amplifies this hatred for political
and ideological reasons.
forty wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
It's not only the tech startups, I've mentioned it because
that's what a know best, but my brother works for a large
industrial company, and they use the same tricks and also
have their reports done by professional bullshit companies
whose jobs is to make it look like some research happened
(in their case it's sometimes somewhat the case - unlike
tech startups - but most of it is just bullshit).
Galanwe wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
My experience, from 20 years as well, aligns with
widespread abuses. Pretty much the whole financial sector
is sponsored by the CIR, none of which contribute anything
beyond the bullshit reports mentioned above. I myself wrote
countless reports like that, most of them vastly
autogenerated to look pompous.
I don't remember having to defend anything to get the CIR,
it's more of a judgment call on whether you feel confident
to defend it if you get an audit, and these are very rare.
We've had such audit in the past, and it made everyone
rewrite each submitted report in a hurry to make them look
more serious. No sanction were applied.
At this point, my opinion is that the CIR has very little
to do with actual research, but rather it's a discretionary
tax subsidy for sectors in which France wants to be
competitive.
eric-burel wrote 1 day ago:
Hi, CIR expert here, it's well and alive. There has been a
communication push against it last year but relatively over.
It's 30% of R&D expenses as a tax cut.
Update: I think the 50% you mention is related to non salary
expenses CII = a smaller similar system for innovation, which we
differentiate from R&D. CII used to cover non salary expenses with
a 50% forfait but this part has been removed indeed. It still
covers 20% of salary expenses.
nickff wrote 1 day ago:
You can only expense Canadian R&D expenses; meaning anything that is
not completely used up almost immediately is treated as an asset.
This makes almost no difference for software development, but is very
important (and disadvantageous) in more capital-intensive industries.
ttul wrote 17 hours 40 min ago:
They just added capital expenditures as well at a 40% rate
(compared with 35% for salaries). So this is no longer a concern.
anovikov wrote 1 day ago:
So it means that indirectly, developers' salaries are not a taxable
income in Canada if they are working on R&D? Meaning, they do pay
taxes on their income, but their employer gets those taxes back, so
if tax is 60%, the employer could pay 250% of what they'd pay
otherwise, get 150% back, then the developer pays 150% of taxes, and
gets 100%, so in effect the salary is tax-free. Is that what you
meant to say?
If so, it sounds almost too good to be true. Why aren't all startups
in Canada?
__turbobrew__ wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
There is lots of paperwork for SR&ED, enough so that companies opt
not to do it.
Canada wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I never thought of it that way. Your plan sounds great, but,
in practice how it works is you get paid about half of what you
would get in the US. Currently less than half due to the unusual
currency exchange rates.
throwawaysleep wrote 1 day ago:
Canada's lack of startups is heavily cultural.
We adopt new products less. We are far more risk averse about
purchasing goods or services from startups, far more risk averse
about funding them (founders often give personal guarantees to get
the investment), value the equity startups offer at far less, etc.
Government is far more fussy about accountability with that
refundable R&D money, so lots of time is spent filling out
paperwork and hiring consultants to do it.
Here is a video that explains a lot about Canadian purchasing:
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.4596459
throwaway2037 wrote 1 day ago:
The cultural bit is underrated. Tobias Lütke from Germany is
the co-founder and CEO of Shopify has written about this issue of
Canadian business culture extensively. Also, the ecosystem of
VCs in the US are unmatched globally. And, the internal market
in US is f'ing huge.
tormeh wrote 1 day ago:
I don’t think this is uniquely Canadian. And it’s usually
semi-rational, if you really hate dealing with switching. Most
cheaper subscription providers will give you a good deal at
first, then jack up the prices when they’re bought by a major
provider. New cheaper providers are founded, and the cycle
continues. The cheaper prices last for two or three years, or
similarly short. Most people would rather take the loss than
having to pay attention to this stuff.
nickff wrote 1 day ago:
There are many limits on SR&ED, and the reporting/auditing process
is burdensome. Canada also suffers from a variety of other
inconveniences, mostly related to its dependence on resource
extraction-related industries.
ttul wrote 17 hours 39 min ago:
It’s not terrible in comparison to the scale of the benefit.
Just outsource the report writing to KPMG or another capable and
reputable accounting firm and you’ll survive audits and it
won’t kill your team. I would say over the years, SRED has
helped us become better at managing the efficiency of dev.
sMarsIntruder wrote 1 day ago:
I hate to see this, but you’re comparing two completely different
systems.
Like it or not, but Canada is much more “socialist”, you can’t
expect it in any case to be like US or viceversa.
ttul wrote 17 hours 33 min ago:
I suppose it takes living in both countries to really just whether
Canada is “much” more socialist. The US has a lot of socialism
in the form of generous disability income replacement programs,
Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP, and the like. Canadian provinces must
implement a single payor medical insurance program within certain
parameters, but dentistry - bar a very new and very small federal
program - is fully private. And pharmaceutical pricing is largely
free market.
When you zoom in on some of the Big Beautiful Bill’s new
programs, they appear more “socialist” than anything Canadians
have ever enjoyed.
llm_nerd wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Canada is much more socialist, in your take, so it has more
programs for corporations and private enterprise? Huh? This is
nonsensical.
Further, it's incredibly difficult to quantify countries on this
purported socialism scale. Sure, Canada has universal healthcare
like every single developed country but the US, but otherwise it's
much more of a mixed bag. The US has always been vastly more
"socialist" than its advocates think -- the military is a colossal
make work project and is straight out of Soviet doctrine for
central planning -- and of course the entire agricultural industry
exists under a massive subsidization regime, but under the current
administration....whoa.... There is no Western country that has a
central planned economy, with a president that is taking direct
control of corporations (US Steel) and demanding ownership of
corporations (TikTok), while enlisting private executives as
members of the military exactly like China ( [1] ), all while
saying the entire economy is a "store" that he has sole control
over. Absolutely no one in the US, looking very Stalinesque ala the
late 1930s, should be throwing stones about socialism.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/25/meta-ex...
cbsmith wrote 1 day ago:
Canada is "much more socialist" in that it has socialized medical
insurance. Aside from that, it's maybe a tiny bit more socialist,
though one could argue it's not more socialist at all.
The systems are different, but saying they are completely different
is really a stretch. There's a GST that the US doesn't have, which
is, ironically, a regressive tax. If you ranked the tax code of
countries by similarity to the US tax code, I'm not sure Canada
would be at the top of the list, but it wouldn't be that far down.
whatshisface wrote 1 day ago:
I saw a chart that added the market value of government support to
income for US persons, and it used the term "household resources."
I'd like to see a table of household resource distributions for
Canada and the US.
agwa wrote 1 day ago:
As a small software business owner, I have to agree with Michele Hansen
(who spent 2 years advocating on behalf of small software businesses
for this very change): "we’re finally going to get Section 174
relief, and I couldn’t be angrier"
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mjwhansen_it-looks-like-were-fi...
Thorrez wrote 1 day ago:
Is the girl in the picture going to lose coverage? If yes, what part
of the OBBB is going to remove her coverage? If not, then why go into
all this detail about her if she's going to keep her coverage?
GenerWork wrote 13 hours 14 min ago:
Nobody can answer any of these questions because they've been
misled by misinformation which has ironically been promoted by the
same people who bleat about misinformation on a daily basis.
benreesman wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah. This is a tough one. Its a really bad bill that happens to also
be the best thing that could happen in the economic life of most any
programmer.
This is going to make a lot of people's lives a lot worse and I'm
against it even though it's an absurd windfall for me and people like
me.
andrepd wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah. Not gonna lie it's a bit obscene watching people in this
thread revelling that their absurdly highly paid jobs will become
even more highly paid, given what's at stake.
benreesman wrote 22 hours 32 min ago:
When the hammer fell in late 2022 / early 2023 I was out of work
for the first time in 20 years of uninterrupted employment
without one day of unemployment. Having just carried my family
(financially) through a bereavement that left people effectively
unable to work (there are a zillion expenses you don't think
about) I was also running on fumes myself, and I very rapidly
surmised that I was going bankrupt
: I had a cost structure that takes a minimum of a year to change
and I had just gotten done telling the Valley where to stick
their millions a few years earlier.
So for me this is like, the end of a period where contrarian
hackers can be passed on at arbitrary ability in a way that has
no lower limit: there is no bottom now and there is no safety
net.
But I had about a decade of just never having to care about money
at all before that, so maybe there's some karma in it too.
For me this is like, OK I'm definitely not going to get frozen
out of work with no place to live anymore, and I'd be lying if I
said I didn't sleep easier last night than I have in a while.
But even from that vantage point, I oppose the passage of this
bill and will argue to see it overturmed: the people who it hurts
are more vulnerable still.
doctorpangloss wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure if this is an absurd windfall... It aligns software
developers with the guild professionals, like dentists and lawyers,
who had an economically equivalent benefit via S corp
distributions. Except to get this one, you have to pay a royalty to
someone to write your technical narrative.
benreesman wrote 1 day ago:
I got more inbound recruiter email in the last week than in the
two years up until last week.
Everyone's BATNA just skyrocketed. What you choose to do with a
huge surge in your pricing power is up to you, but you have it.
yieldcrv wrote 1 day ago:
I disagree, every rider was independently lobbied for and the outcome
would be the same if passed separately by Congress or as a rider in a
larger bill like it was.
There is no reason to have cognitive dissonance over it.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
If you have a huge omnibus bill that has a good thing that the
representative's constituents want, and then a mountain of burning
trash attached to it, and the representative votes for the bill,
they can defend the vote as getting the thing their constituents
wanted.
If you make them each a different bill and then the constituents
want to know why they voted in favor of the hot garbage by itself,
how can they answer?
edaemon wrote 1 day ago:
If every rider was independently proposed the outcome wouldn't be
the same, reconciliation wouldn't apply and 60 Senate votes would
be required to pass them.
yieldcrv wrote 1 day ago:
decent point
two counteracting forces:
The senate parliamentarian decided they could be in the
reconciliation bill
and outside of the reconciliation bill, believe it or not,
Congress does pass other bills over the 60 senate vote threshold
This R&D one would be a decent candidate
acheron wrote 1 day ago:
It proves they never actually cared in the first place, it’s just
arguments as soldiers.
johncole wrote 1 day ago:
I think we will see this lead to a boost in software developer
employment.
kelnos wrote 1 day ago:
At best it will undo some of the decline over the past 2-3 years.
This "solution" is to a problem the GOP created themselves during
Trump's first term, when they made the R&D deduction stuff expire in
2022.
noodletheworld wrote 1 day ago:
Are you being serious or sarcastic? I cant tell.
Seriously, that seems unlikely.
Changes like this may have an impact on employment but it’s
impossible to observe the results in a vacuum.
Given that most large companies are towing the “AI means less jobs
required” line, it seems likely that this will, at best, modestly
slow the rate at which companies divest themselves of software
developers.
I cant see any reasonable reason, in a broader context, this would
have a meaningful impact.
(Yeah yeah, AI means more jobs one day maybe, but right now that is
categorically not true, and the future is always pure speculation,
but in the near term, the impact of this seems like it probably wont
be material to me; maybe a small reduction in the number of layoffs)
BobbyJo wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
> I cant see any reasonable reason, in a broader context, this
would have a meaningful impact.
A significant amount of software dev employment is in startups.
Companies that are spending on development, but aren't making much
money yet, will see a huge benefit from this. The change in tax
liability could mean a single seed or series A round paying for an
extra 1-2 devs.
mlinhares wrote 1 day ago:
I doubt it, the narrative is that software engineering is dead and
everything will be replaced by AI, so that salaries can continue to
be depressed. Just like the original passing didn't really cause much
trouble in the general market this repeal will mostly just produce
more shareholder value.
BobbyJo wrote 1 day ago:
Original passing didn't cause much trouble because the provision
didn't take effect til 4 years later.
seattle_spring wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone who knows anything about software and has used AI for more
than 24 hours knows that AI won't be "replacing" software
engineering anytime soon.
mlinhares wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
That doesn’t matter, what matters is making the narrative
stick.
akmarinov wrote 1 day ago:
Hard disagree, I’ve been agentic coding the past couple of
months and have written maybe 100 lines doing this for a living.
The rest is coming up with SDDs and reviewing AI’s code.
I can easily see most devs, doctors and lawyers automated away in
the next couple of years.
seattle_spring wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
I'd love to get access to codebases made entirely with agentic
coding that people deem a success. Everything they've suggested
for me beyond trivial work has been wildly overcomplicated.
coffeebeqn wrote 1 day ago:
Either we have wildly different difficulty levels at our jobs
or this is bs. I tried the agents (I get access to basically
all state of the art from my company) and they still have all
the same issues of agents from a year back. Each step gets more
chaotic and the end result is always that I end up reverting
the over complicated mess it made and writing it myself.
One-offs with lots of context still sometimes work.
Even a perfect eval loop like failing tests end up 80% of the
time with them creating something way too complicated since
they solve one visible but not root issue at a time and build
on top of that hacky foundation until again I end up reverting
it all
akmarinov wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah - that’s the hard part now - dialing things down to
eliminate the divergent paths the AI can take to implement
what you want.
You can tell it “implement feature X” and it’ll go and
do whatever’s easiest for it, often something dumb,
that’s when people usually think “it’s dumb, wonâ€�…
replace devs” and give up. Or you can nail down your
requirements by talking to it and describing what you’re
looking for, often it comes back with things you hadn’t
considered or ways of doing things you didn’t know. Then
just tell it “implement this SDD” and watch it one shot
it in an hour or so.
There’s also pain points - some languages like Swift have
changed so often and there’s little open source code to
train on out there, so it’s on the worse side if you do iOS
development.
It’s a new skill that needs working at, but in the end your
output is significantly increased.
seattle_spring wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
> in the end your output is significantly increased.
The claim you're arguing against is that AI will replace
software engineering as a discipline. Seems like you're
instead saying that it will increase developer
productivity, which no one disagrees with.
akmarinov wrote 17 hours 38 min ago:
Well yeah, if you have one senior with the power of 2-3
AI agents - you don’t need juniors or sometimes mid
developers at all. Let’s say you’re Whatsapp and your
20 people develop the app, well now you need 5 at most
for the same workload.
Obviously we’re not yet at the point where the CEO can
enter “build me the next Uber” in Claude Code and
watch the stock price go up.
throwawaysleep wrote 1 day ago:
Very much agree.
I am overemployed with 3 dev jobs at once. AI is writing
virtually all my code and letting me nap all day. Eventually
that will end once people see the power of them.
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote 1 day ago:
ive been coding 5+ hours a day almost every day for 15 years. i
think ai will replace 70% of SWE in the near future. not
employement, but 70% of the current work done by engineers
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
At which point you're potentially looking at Jevon's Paradox.
Software developers do X and Y. AI thing can now do X, so it's
used for that, and it's cheaper, so the number of projects
increase because you get more demand at a lower price. Those
projects each need someone to do Y.
zeroonetwothree wrote 1 day ago:
I don’t even spend 70% of my time coding. I suspect that’s
common and looking at data it’s more like 25% on average. So
even if it replaces 100% of coding (unlikely) that’s the
extent of the gain.
kasey_junk wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
Some of my biggest productivity gains with llms come from
areas that aren’t coding. Research, summation,
communication and operational issues have all seen pretty
dramatic improvements for me when adding llms.
I don’t think ai will replace the career of software
development but I do think the tools we will be using to to
it will be dramatically different.
distances wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed, seems it's a great day if I get close to 50% of
coding time. The rest is various meetings, communication, and
code review.
And even with reviews you can currently plausibly automate
only the code correctness check part, the juicy part of
reviews is always manual testing of the change and doing the
logical reasoning if the change is doing a meaningful thing.
And no, the ticket with the spec is not a reliable source of
this info for an LLM as it's always just a partial
understanding of the concept.
jnfno wrote 1 day ago:
I’ve been coding 5+ a day since the late 80s
And I agree. Because ultimately we don’t need that much code
in the first place. We need robust data sets.
AI models will enable the data driven machine state dream.
Chips that self improve models will boot strap from them and
rely on humans to iteratively improve updates.
Coding like it’s 1970 in the 2020s and beyond is not that
high tech.
hightrix wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed. I see AI as a major tool upgrade in the same way the
IDE was an upgrade from text editors. It will quickly replace
the need to do trivial things and greatly reduce the time
needed to do complex things.
x3n0ph3n3 wrote 1 day ago:
It's always been a nonsense narrative with lack of grounding in
reality.
lsllc wrote 1 day ago:
Might even ameliorate some of the corporate RTO efforts and now s/w
devs will have more employment choice and a presumably more vibrant
job market.
Spartan-S63 wrote 1 day ago:
I’m hoping so, too, along with another boost in salary growth since
they’re immediately expensable.
umeshunni wrote 1 day ago:
The 2nd most annoying thing about section 174 was all the time you had
to spend classifying each engineer's time spent as R&D or 'internal
software'. At my last company, every year, me and my engineering lead
counterparts would spent almost a day reviewing each engineer's JIRA
tickets to reconstruct how much of their time was spent on R&D vs
internal software.
monster_truck wrote 1 day ago:
Why would you waste time doing this when you could just make shit up?
And just to clarify, that has been the MO any time I've been told to
do this. If it's actually important they wouldn't want your numbers
Cipater wrote 1 day ago:
>was all the time you had to spend classifying each engineer's time
spent as R&D or 'internal software'
> every year, me and my engineering lead counterparts would spend
almost a day
This is quite funny. Not even a day, almost one.
supriyo-biswas wrote 1 day ago:
At a previous employer, they used to have this process where they
would classify each project as being in active development or being
in maintenance, and even the tiniest bit of development work required
the "initiation" of a "project" with budget planning and approvals.
At the time I dismissed it as a bureaucratic process invented by the
company; after all, they had no dearth of leaders adding bureaucracy
to systems for the purpose of empire-building and, to a lesser
extent, asserting self-importance. However, upon reading about
Section 174, it made some sense, and I wonder whether they might just
get around to removing these processes.
viraptor wrote 1 day ago:
> and even the tiniest of development work required the
"initiation" of a "project" with budget planning and approvals.
That's fully automateable though, right? Sounds like my script to
upload a PR, create a JIRA ticket with the same name, link them up,
auto-Done on merge.
supriyo-biswas wrote 1 day ago:
At the company I was speaking of, the business approval step
involved many internal (and sometimes external meetings) and
preparation of a feature and OKR document.
While this was the obvious way of doing things there, without
this project step I also don’t think it’d have been regarded
as a valid classification step for tax purposes.
samrus wrote 1 day ago:
You cant automate the tactical assessment of "do we want to incur
this tax?" Not easily anyway
viraptor wrote 1 day ago:
I meant most of the process and boilerplate being automated.
Someone still has to go through the rubberstamping process, but
at least the BS and clicks can come from the BS and clicks
generator.
lsllc wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like prior years can be caught up with:
> Companies with capitalized domestic R&D expenses from 2022–2024 can
elect a catch-up deduction, which could significantly improve cash flow
for firms engaged in innovation.
tomrod wrote 1 day ago:
If correct, this is a good thing on a generally bad, overstuffed bill.
Immediate expensing never should have been changed in the first place,
and it was always weird seeing people twist themselves in knots
defending it.
lazyeye wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
Maybe for every other item in the bill there is a another group of
people out there who also think that "that is a good thing on a
generally bad, overstuffed bill".
tossandthrow wrote 1 day ago:
> Immediate expensing never should have been changed in the first
place
This is indicative of ignorance. There is a reason why we have these
rules.
trollbridge wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
Sure, but not allowing expensing of software R&D was asinine.
tomrod wrote 20 hours 2 min ago:
Please expound
tossandthrow wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
Ofcause.
Fundamentally there are reasons why we don't allow companies to
funnel all operational profits into capital assets without them
paying taxes.
An analogy would be a company that used all their profits to
extract gold from the ground such that they get the labor worth
of gold out. In doing so they would effeciently dodge paying
taxes of their profits.
Now back to your comment: you portray it is as only good that
this law was changes
. And in doing so you leave out these details that essentially
leads to instantiating laws like these.
rsync wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
Your analogy suggests a deferment of taxes paid but not
elimination.
In your example, they still own all the gold and would
eventually pay taxes on any liquidation.
I bring this up because I, too, am as interested in your parent
to know the original inspiration for these parts of the tax
code…
Further: I have a suspicion that this should be applied
differently to C-corps vs. pass through entities in the same
way that corporate taxes and retained earnings are…
tossandthrow wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
The depends on how you implement it.
You could also just don't allow to deduct taxes on the work
out into digging out the gold.
In the end I do not care. But i feel like people would be
equally ignorant if it was proposed to tax the software in
other ways (eg VAT on the derived services from operating).
Regardless, these are the discussions to have.
mindslight wrote 1 day ago:
Twisting not required. Depreciation straightforwardly applies to
every other business capital expenditure. Hire someone to put a new
roof on a rental property, and you're out the tens of thousands of
dollars cash while only getting an immediate deduction for one
thirtieth of the value. If you were expecting to pay that cash out of
income, it's effectively a realized income and then reinvestment.
The recent (-ly undone) change went against decades of how things
were, was crippling for medium size cashflow-positive startups,
effectively increased taxes, etc. But it was really just a
straightforward application of the general principles that apply to
most everything else.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
> The recent (-ly undone) change went against decades of how things
were, was crippling for medium size cashflow-positive startups,
effectively increased taxes, etc. But it was really just a
straightforward application of the general principles that apply to
most everything else.
The error was in reconciling them by getting rid of it for software
R&D instead of allowing other business expenses to be deducted when
they're paid for as well.
For large stable incumbents that have the same expenses every year,
the difference doesn't matter except in the first years after you
make the change, because it doesn't matter if you deduct all of
this year's expense this year or 5% of each of the last 20 years'
expenses this year, they add up to the same deduction every year.
Where it matters is for new challengers, because they don't have
arbitrarily many years worth of legacy expenses to deduct, so their
deduction in their first year will be less than their incumbent
competitor's.
It also creates a disincentive (or competitive disadvantage) to
increase long-term investments. If some existing company had been
making a $5M investment every year but is now facing new foreign
competition and needs to increase it to $10M in order to stay
competitive, they're in the same position as the upstart. Moreover,
then they may not be able to do it, because they were going to have
to run lean and divert the $5M profit they usually make to
increasing their capital investments, but then the government is
expecting tax on most of that $5M which means they can't spend it
this year it even though it's ultimately a deduction.
Notice what this does specifically in the case of real estate: If
rents start going up the normal incentive is to build new housing,
but now you have to put out all the money to build a new building
in year 0 and not get to deduct it for decades. Is that the
incentive we want? Probably not.
trollbridge wrote 18 hours 2 min ago:
The immediate effect of this is that one of my customers simply
cranked up the amount they can spend on R&D this year by the
amount of the tax savings. Which is substantial, because they
were only planning to expense 20% of what they would pay us, and
budget paying about 25% in income taxes on the rest.
So out of $100,000, that’s $17,600 more in spending, or a 17.6%
increase. And they can expense that extra $17,600 too.
mindslight wrote 21 hours 4 min ago:
Sure, a lot of that understanding was included in my recognition
of the downsides.
The fundamental dynamic is that the government wants there to be
a forcing function on having to actually realize profits, so that
taxes have to be paid in a timely fashion. They don't want people
to be able to reinvest all of the effective profit and keep
kicking the can into the future indefinitely. Capital gains and
retirement plans are exceptions, each for their own reasons.
phonon wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
...and 1031 Exchanges. People defer profits on real estate
across generations, now.
AnthonyMouse wrote 17 hours 40 min ago:
> The fundamental dynamic is that the government wants there to
be a forcing function on having to actually realize profits, so
that taxes have to be paid in a timely fashion. They don't want
people to be able to reinvest all of the effective profit and
keep kicking the can into the future indefinitely.
I would have to question whether that is actually a good
policy.
To begin with, it doesn't work unless you do it consistently,
which they don't. Then businesses defer the taxes anyway, and
you get huge market distortions because it majorly affects
where investments go, e.g. we're then lacking for sufficient
housing construction because it's heavily disfavored by the tax
code over alternatives. But doing it consistently also doesn't
work because many of the industries that have exemptions have
them because they would implode without them. In particular,
anything that experiences significant foreign competition would
be screwed as soon as the other country does it the other way.
It would also create bad incentives -- you'd have to get rid of
the retirement deferral, damage everyone's retirement savings
and create perverse incentives for immediate spending over
saving/investing.
Moreover, the main reason we use an income tax instead of a
consumption tax is in order to have a progressive rate
structure. If you want to put a different effective rate on
someone who spends $1M/year than someone to spends $10k/year, a
merchant collecting the tax at the point of sale wouldn't know
what rate to charge. (There are also other ways to achieve
this, like combining a flat consumption tax with a UBI to
achieve the desired effective rate curve, but that's a more
systemic change.)
But if you allow business expenses to be deducted immediately,
that's another path to having a consumption tax with a
progressive effective rate curve. The rate can be higher for
the people who spend more but you still have to pay the tax
when you want to buy a yacht or a personal mansion. It also
gives you a way out of the "they borrow money to avoid
realizing capital gains" thing: Make the loan taxable income in
the year it's taken out and a deduction in the year it's paid
back, but if it's a business loan then you get a canceling
deduction when you take it out and invest it (and the same for
e.g. student loans), which makes it so you can't spend the
money on personal consumption without paying the tax.
Meanwhile if you always reinvest 100% of profits then you don't
pay tax until you stop, but that's what we want them to do.
Build housing, hire people, invent things, donate to charity.
These things are tax deductions on purpose.
mindslight wrote 16 hours 27 min ago:
> But if you allow business expenses to be deducted
immediately, that's another path to having a consumption tax
with a progressive effective rate curve
If I had written a longer comment, I was going to go in a
similar direction. But I think it's a bit fallacious to be
talking about that when it would make the tax code even more
lopsided to heavily taxing wage earners. Like when you buy a
car to be able to get to work, you can't even deduct that
from your earnings even though it is a necessary expense for
being able to earn that income. If that last part were
changed - both with direct deduction of things like living
expenses and also unrestricted traditional IRA
contributions/withdrawals, then it would make sense to start
talking in terms of moving towards a de facto consumption
tax. But without doing that, it just seems like a rallying
cry to further reduce taxes on the investment-owning classes.
(I'm using the word "deduct" in the business tax sense of
direct subtraction, not the personal income tax sense where
your expenses have to rise above the level that is otherwise
a personal exemption. Being able to deduct so many specific
expenses would of course end up placing a heavy bookkeeping
burden on individuals, though)
djoldman wrote 1 day ago:
?
This applied to salaries, it wasn't a capital expenditure as
"capital expenditure" has traditionally been defined.
This was an operational expense.
tomrod wrote 1 day ago:
While accurate, capex captures the building of things, like
hiring a company (that pays salaries) to build a factory.
mindslight wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, salaries spent to build a capital asset. Half the cost of a
new roof is paying salaries, right? And yet, you still depreciate
the whole value of the completed thing, not just the cost of the
input materials. If you hire the roofers yourself as employees,
you're still supposed to be accounting this way - although
obviously there are many ways to fudge it.
The point is that building a piece of software that is going to
be in use for several+ years is creating an asset. It just goes
against our intuition since this industry is so driven by fast
fashion, and the bookkeeping of specific components, their
depreciation schedules, early end of life, (etc) seems like
needless complexity.
eastbound wrote 1 day ago:
The debate is the duration of the capex in software. The law
will oscillate between “Software lasts 15 years!” and
“basically throw-away”.
At this moment, the law came back to 1-year deprecation.
mindslight wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
"1-year deprecation [sic]" would mean that salaries paid in
the second half of the (fiscal) year are only half deductible
in that year, and half in the next.
But seriously what is with this trend of throwing out simple
reframings as if they're insightful on their own?
creato wrote 1 day ago:
At least 50% of time on every software team I've ever been on
was spent on maintenance and fixing bugs.
You can expense such time as opex, but it has to be justified,
and that's often difficult to do. Did you fix a bug by
refactoring some code to avoid the problem? Is that capex or
opex? Can you convince the IRS of such?
The old (and now new) rules eliminated this accounting game and
uncertainty.
mindslight wrote 1 day ago:
Sure. I get that having to facilitate accounting takes away
from programming, and that nothing is cut in dry with the
IRS. I'm not even a fan of the general idea of mandatory
depreciation schedules, seeing depreciation as more of an
artifact that fell out from double entry book keeping's
proliferation of different types of accounts. My only point
was that this is just the same regime that everything else
has to deal with.
For example if you pay someone to fix a leaky roof and they
replace a section of a given size, can you call it a
repair/maintenance expense or should you be depreciating it
as an improvement to the building? Can you convince the IRS
of such? The only reason this has more straightforward
answers is that accountants have been answering this question
longer.
earth2mars wrote 1 day ago:
This. TCJA removed it and OBBBA restored it. What am I missing here
rhinoceraptor wrote 1 day ago:
Classic 45-47 maneuver, first create a problem. Then solve it,
often poorly and incompletely. Finally, claim victory, another 300
IQ 5D chess move in the books.
FireBeyond wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
Or set a little timing booby trap. Like in this, "We're going to
cut Medicaid, but only after the midterms, so if you start
screaming about it, we'll blame the Dems for it."
lesuorac wrote 1 day ago:
It lets you claim BBB doesn't increase the budget by as much as
it'll ultimately do.
By having a bunch of random provision in BBB that generate revenue
it lowers it's impact on the defect and then you can repeal them
later on after passing BBB.
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
It’s an overstuffed bill because nobody will compromise on anything
so the only way to pass a bill that has anything even remotely
controversial to either party is one reconciliation bill a year.
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
Which is why we need to get rid of reconciliation and go back to
actually needing to get compromise, but hell will freeze over twice
before that happens.
pfannkuchen wrote 1 day ago:
It seems like a more formalized quid pro quo system is needed so
that political favors can be split across bills and relied upon.
This sort of thing seems to be human nature, it doesn’t help
anyone to pretend in the procedural rules that it doesn’t happen.
disgruntledphd2 wrote 1 day ago:
This was called pork when it used to happen and people were very
angry about it.
pfannkuchen wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
Pork wasn’t formalized, though, was it?
Though I agree that favors did seem to be more separated across
bills in the past. This is an interesting manifestation of
congress becoming a lower trust system, I suppose.
dragonwriter wrote 1 day ago:
> It’s an overstuffed bill because nobody will compromise on
anything so the only way to pass a bill that has anything even
remotely controversial to either party is one reconciliation bill a
year.
No, and lots of controversial bills have passed other than as
reconciliation bills, and especially so during trifectas where they
"controversial" within the minority party but broadly supported by
the majority; reconciliation is necessary to pass something that
strains unity in the majority party and is uniformly opposed by
(not "controversial to") the minority party, perhaps.
sugarpimpdorsey wrote 1 day ago:
The last time something like that happened was probably the
Patriot Act.
rpiguy wrote 1 day ago:
Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was the most sweeping
legislation ever passed via reconciliation.
apsec112 wrote 1 day ago:
Obamacare was passed via regular order (60 Senate votes), not
reconciliation. There was a follow-up package to tweak it
that passed via reconciliation in 2010, but the original bill
was regular order. It's the only (very brief) window where
one party has held 60 Senate seats since 1977.
rpiguy wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Whoops! I remembered the reconciliation but not the initial
vote.
Calavar wrote 1 day ago:
The 2024 Ukraine defense funding bill passed despite having <
50% support in the majority party in the House, and it was not
part of a reconciliation.
cheriot wrote 1 day ago:
In the last 10 years, have there been more than a handful of
bills that got 60 votes in the senate?
I wouldn't like what the current congress would do without the
filibuster, but at this point a paralyzed system might be worse.
margalabargala wrote 1 day ago:
Absolutely. Many bills in the Senate in that time have gotten
over 90. Here's one that passed 95-2 that I picked at random.
[1] A lot of what happens in Congress is obvious to do and
everyone agrees. While the media certainly focuses on the
handful of things the two parties are at odds over, most of the
lawmaking done by Congress is not controversial between
parties, and is simply passed, so we don't hear about it.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bi...
a_wild_dandan wrote 1 day ago:
What does that matter? We're talking trifectas here, not
supermajorities. The filibuster is a cute remnant of "decorum."
It's a vestigial rule which will disappear when too
inconvenient. (Fun question with not-so-fun answers: why isn't
the filibuster gone already?)
Spivak wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
Because I don't think it's vestigial, I think it's serving an
important function of governance that never made it into the
official
rules but is nonetheless necessary as a stabilizing effect.
It doesn't have to be the filibuster but something ought to
provide the effect. It should be easier to block legislation
than to pass it. It wouldn't be a good thing if you could
have huge policy swings when a 51-49 becomes 49-51. Being
able to, with effort, demand specific pieces of legislation
reach a higher bar biases us toward the status quo.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
> (Fun question with not-so-fun answers: why isn't the
filibuster gone already?)
Because both parties are scared eventually the other party
will be back in the majority.
int_19h wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
I don't think Republicans need to worry about Dems retaking
the Senate anytime soon.
actionfromafar wrote 1 day ago:
So it seems like a good canary? If it’s removed, the
ruling party is no longer afraid it will be ever removed
from power.
9283409232 wrote 1 day ago:
The answer is to vote out politicians. Getting ranked choice
voting on your states ballot would go a long way to fixing
this. They would not have Mamdani on the ballot for NY mayor if
it wasn't for ranked choice voting. Certain politicans know
this and have made RCV illegal in their state. Get RCV on the
ballot for your state.
FireBeyond wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
> Certain politicans know this and have made RCV illegal in
their state.
That would be Republicans.
While Democrats have pushed across multiple states for
changing voting mechanisms, Republicans in eleven states have
pre-emptively banned any and all use of RCV at any level
within the state.
AnthonyMouse wrote 1 day ago:
Score voting (or STAR) is better.
9283409232 wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Anything is better than what we have and ranked choice
voting is the most popular alternative.
AnthonyMouse wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
If you're doing a new thing anyway then it makes no sense
to do something worse instead of something better.
Popularity is determined by people; make the better thing
the popular one.
9283409232 wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
It absolutely makes sense. You need buy in from the
public. RCV is the most known alternative and it has
taken a decade to get it that far. If you want to start
the work of informing people about STAR voting then be
my guess but RCV is a tremendous improvement from what
we have and an acceptable alternative.
nerdsniper wrote 16 hours 26 min ago:
Personally I think “approval voting” is almost
as good as RCV but orders of magnitude easier to sell
to the public.
There’s just a checkbox next to each candidate and
you check the box next to any candidate you’re
“okay” with. Results in the most “okay-estâ�…
candidates getting elected so when the winner is
announced everyone goes “…okay.”
Also could make primaries less important, because
multiple candidates from a party could theoretically
run for the general election without splitting votes.
Communication is easier because in RCV the candidate
who gets the most #1 votes doesn’t necessarily win
which could lead to a loss of confidence in the
system. Its very easy to tell the American public
“this guy got the most checkmarks” and no one
gets confused.
9283409232 wrote 15 hours 30 min ago:
If I recall the problem with approval voting is
that it is much easier to tamper with than RCV.
Filling in an empty bubble is a lot easier than
changing the order of ranking on a ballot
nerdsniper wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
That’s a good point. Seems like that could be a
problem for current ballots too - add a second
checkmark to invalidate ballots voting for the
“other” guy. Doesn’t seem to be a
widespread issue, but detecting it for current
ballots would be more obvious.
Maybe that breaks this idea. Maybe ideally
you’d maybe want a touchscreen+printer to fill
in the bubbles with printer ink and show it to
the voter for them to double-check before putting
in the stack (or, if wrong bubble filled, put it
in rejected stack).
Would love more feedback from people to get a
better sense of all pros and cons.
AnthonyMouse wrote 17 hours 37 min ago:
Most people don't actually know anything about any of
this. If they've heard of RCV at all their
understanding of it is at the level of "it's
something different than the status quo and
supposedly better". You could swap in STAR and they
mostly wouldn't even notice that you've changed
anything. But you'd notice the difference in the
election outcomes, in a good way.
9283409232 wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
Enough people know about it that it has been put on
ballots in several states and has had strong pushes
in other states while STAR hasn't at all. If you
want to get outside and start informing people
about STAR then please do but RCV has a decade long
head start and is the path of least resistance.
boroboro4 wrote 1 day ago:
Not important but Mamdani would’ve won without ranked
choice voting too, it didn’t play a role in the end.
tialaramex wrote 1 day ago:
We can't know. Ranked choice changes how people vote.
In particular it gives people permission to vote for a
candidate they like but don't expect to be able to win.
mindslight wrote 1 day ago:
RCV / Ranked Pairs of course. The IRV decision process is
still a relic of the two party system, with the possibility
for some pretty terrible strategic-voting dynamics as votes
diverge from just two major parties.
dragonwriter wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
RCV is another name for IRV, it is not a generic name for
the use of ranked ballots.
apsec112 wrote 1 day ago:
"Despite Democrats holding thin majorities in both chambers
during a period of intense political polarization, the 117th
Congress (2021-2023) oversaw the passage of numerous
significant bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act,
American Rescue Plan Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs
Act, Postal Service Reform Act, Bipartisan Safer Communities
Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Honoring Our PACT Act, Electoral
Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, and
Respect for Marriage Act."
All of these except the first two were bipartisan and got 60
Senate votes (or more)
thomquaid wrote 1 day ago:
[1] It does seem like things are trending toward less public
laws passing over the last decade, as well as record low time
in session and other congressional activity.
[1]: https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/yearl...
n_u wrote 1 day ago:
It also classifies software development as R&D which together with
immediate expensing for R&D undoes the Section 174 changes as far as I
understand.
“For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in
connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a
research or experimental expenditure“
Page 303 of bill here [1] Original article about Section 174 tax code
causing layoffs [2] Post from @dang with more info about Section 174
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr1/BILLS-119hr1eas.pdf
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
Thorrez wrote 1 day ago:
>It also classifies software development as R&D
The TCJA (passed in 2017) already did that (effective 2022). So it
sounds like this new bill is keeping that, but changing the deduction
rules back to what they were before 2022.
See this previous discussion of the TCJA:
> all "software development" is now an R&E expense. [1] (AIUI, "R&D"
(research and development) and "R&E" (research and experimentation)
are synonyms.)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34627712
tareqak wrote 1 day ago:
Page 301
> there shall allowed as a deduction any domestic research and
experimental expenditures which are paid or incurred by the taxpayer
in the current taxable year
AFAIK, there was no domestic vs. foreign R&D distinction in section
174 before.
Thorrez wrote 1 day ago:
There was a domestic vs foreign distinction in the TCJA, passed in
2017, which took effect in 2022:
> 174 to require taxpayers to amortize specified R&E expenditures
ratably over a five-year period for domestic expenditures and a
15-year period for specified R&E expenditures attributed to foreign
research
[1]: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2022/nov/amort...
mjoin wrote 1 day ago:
That's nuts
rufus_foreman wrote 1 day ago:
Actual title is "House Passes Tax Bill Sending to President for
Signature – Details Inside".
tareqak wrote 1 day ago:
I came across the article on Techmeme, and they used the following
title: “President Trump signs the One Big Beautiful Bill, which
allows immediate deduction of US software labor; foreign R&D still
must be amortized over 15 years”.
9283409232 wrote 1 day ago:
I think editorializing the title is fine in this case. The original
headline is not descriptive and buries the part that would be
relevant to HN.
tareqak wrote 1 day ago:
> Foreign R&D must still be amortized over 15 years
__turbobrew__ wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
How does that actually work? Most large companies open foreign
subsidiaries owned by the parent, for example “Microsoft” will
own “Microsoft Canada” and employees working in Canada work for
“Microsoft Canada” and NOT the main “Microsoft” company.
The R&D done by Canadians is booked against Microsoft Canada, so in
my mind the Canadian laws around R&D would apply and not the USA laws
of 15 years old amortization?
Am I missing something?
eric-burel wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
What qualifies as forein here? Employee located abroad, or hiring
subcontractors from other countries?
me551ah wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, foreign R&D still gets amortized over 15 years (NPV ≈59 % of
a full write-off, so you “lose” ~8.6 % of your R&D spend in
present-value terms, and only 6.7 % of the cost is deductible in year
1, creating a 19.6 % cash-tax gap).
But offshore wages are often 50–70 % below U.S. rates:
• Even after the slower amortization drag, hiring at half the cost
nets you ~30 % total savings on R&D headcount.
• On a pure cash basis you only need ~20 % lower wages to break
even; most offshore markets easily exceed that.
• So the labor-cost arbitrage far outweighs the tax timing penalty
unless your foreign salaries are less than ~20 % below U.S. levels.
In short: the 15-year amort rule hurts your tax deduction, but 50 %+
lower offshore wages more than make up for it.
macinjosh wrote 1 day ago:
Awesome, this literally could not be better for American tech
workers.
loeg wrote 1 day ago:
You might look at the rest of the bill.
earth2mars wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, but why the domestic r&d must be amortized only within 5
years? One way it is harder for finance to deduct all the expense
within 1 year or they have to amortize only within 5 years. In case
of foreign r&d expenses though they cannot detect in the year they
incur but they have 15 years amortize. So I don't get the benefit
of. In fact if they haven't touched this it could have been much
better. In tcja they made it worse. And they fix it partially by
making it deductible within the year they incur for domestic r&d.
But the amortization still kills it.
beebmam wrote 1 day ago:
There's also H-1B (and other worker visa) restrictions/costs
imposed. Overall, quite good for the American tech worker
lukeschlather wrote 1 day ago:
IDK, sounds like it's a bunch of stupid misc. fees. So instead of
just raising the minimum wage for H1Bs and indexing it to
inflation, they raise taxes (and these taxes on H1Bs don't seem
like a consequential funding source. They might even bring in
less tax revenue than raising the H1B minimum wage to where it
should be if it had originally been indexed to inflation.)
autobodie wrote 1 day ago:
>raising the minimum wage for H1Bs and indexing it to inflation
Huh? Not even regular minimum wage is indexed to inflation.
What are you talking about?
lukeschlather wrote 17 hours 13 min ago:
In Washington state it is. But I'm talking about the minimum
salary to get an H1B visa which is $60,000. Given that H1Bs
are intended to substitute for skilled professionals where
the prevailing wage is easily twice that these days, raising
it and indexing it to inflation seems like common sense.
seany wrote 1 day ago:
Huh? Eliminating h1bs tracks better with what's going on.
lesuorac wrote 1 day ago:
Meh.
If you hire H-1B you should be required to pay a fee greater than
it costs to educate an equivalent American. Otherwise you're
always in the situation where you have to hire foreigners because
no Americans are trained. (or in reality you hire foreigners
because they're cheaper for the same role which this no longer
makes it the case)
calvinmorrison wrote 1 day ago:
NJ, home of the H1B scam. I worked with these guys at some
large corporations on contract and as an employeed (F500
companies). I felt bad for them. Modern serfs. They lived in
housing owned by you know the names of these indian firms that
do 'anything'. Companies love the low cost, unlimited hours,
and no need to hire, they're contractors. they sign deals with
big indian vendors to provide everythingunderthesun.
Poor dudes are like ' this is my chance to make it in America'
and the high caste indian management treats them like dirt.
The 'old boomers yelling at young people' is a myth in
professional America compared to the absolute screaming insults
you'd hear hurled at these guys.
And if they messed up? boom, gone, next guy flown in.
supportengineer wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like a CRIME to me.
throwaway7783 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see anything supporting this in the text of OBBB, nor in
the definition of domestic research expense ( [1] ). Where did
you see this?
Edit: Oh you mean costs in general, not in the context of section
147
[1]: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/research_credit_basic_s...
Izikiel43 wrote 1 day ago:
Source?
beebmam wrote 1 day ago:
Extra $250 fee for visa applications: [1] 3.5% remittance fees
on sending money out of the US: [2] Also (in above source), no
ACA subsidies for H-1B visa holders (and others), which likely
means employers they will have to pay more for health care if
they want to cover their immigrant workers
[1]: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/big-b...
[2]: https://www.globalimmigrationblog.com/2025/06/what-are...
unmole wrote 1 day ago:
> 3.5% remittance fees on sending money out of the US:
The version of the bill that passed a 1% excise is applicable
"only to any remittance transfer for which the sender
provides cash, a money order, a cashier’s check, or any
other similar physical instrument".
ndiddy wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
For comparison, India taxes remittances at 20%.
kondu wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
This is not true. There's a TCS of 20%, which is an
advance tax payment that you can claim back in your
income tax returns at the end of the year, and it not an
additional tax. This is just a (bad) mechanism to stop
black money from leaving the country.
ndiddy wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
Thanks I didn't realize that it was refundable, I guess
"India makes people loan 20% of their foreign
remittances to the government interest-free" would be
more accurate.
unmole wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
> "India makes people loan 20% of their foreign
remittances to the government interest-free" would be
more accurate.
It wouldn't. The TCS can be offset against other tax
liabilities. The government pays out 6% interest on
excess tax payments. For reference, 364 day T-bills
are currently yielding ~5.5%.
The idea is to force reporting and add friction. Not
raise revenue.
zhivota wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
Ok thank you I was really worried for a second. Capital
controls are on the bingo card but I was hoping it wouldn't
come yet.
Brybry wrote 1 day ago:
The House's[1] SEC. 112104. EXCISE TAX ON REMITTANCE
TRANSFERS. 3.5% tax became 1% in the Senate's[2] SEC. 70604.
EXCISE TAX ON CERTAIN REMITTANCE TRANSFERS and a lot of the
language changed.
The Senate made a lot of changes (Byrd rule also nuked a lot
of stuff) so old articles are of limited use to the final
bill.
I don't even know if [2] is the actual final text as there is
neither an enrolled or public law version on congress.gov
yet.
It's super annoying how often we can't read the final text of
a bill before Congress votes on it. [1]
[2]
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-b...
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-b...
tareqak wrote 1 day ago:
Quoting all the fees in [1] > Expansion of Immigration Fees:
> $1,000 asylum application fee — first in U.S. history
> $1,000 fee for individuals paroled into the U.S.
> $3,500 fee for sponsors of unaccompanied children
> $5,000 fee for sponsors of unaccompanied children who
fail to appear in court
> $550 fee for work permits
> $500 application fee for Temporary Protected Status
(TPS)
> $400 fee to file a diversity immigrant visa application
> $250 fee to register for the Diversity Visa Lottery
> $250 visa integrity fee
> $100 year fee while asylum applications remain pending
> $100 fee for continuances granted in immigration court
> $5,000 fee for individuals ordered removed in absentia
> $1,500 fee to adjust status to lawful permanent resident
(green card)
> $1,050 fee for inadmissibility waivers
> $900 fee to appeal a decision by an immigration judge
> $900 fee to appeal a decision by DHS
> $1,325 fee to appeal in practitioner disciplinary cases
> $900 fee to file motions to reopen or reconsider
> $600 application fee for suspension of deportation
> $600 application fee for cancellation of removal
(permanent residents)
> $1,500 application fee for cancellation of removal
(non-permanent residents)
> $30 fee for Form I-94 (arrival/departure record), up
from $6
[1]: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/big...
apical_dendrite wrote 1 day ago:
The $100/year fee while an asylum case is pending means
that the government is charging someone for the
government's own inability to process cases quickly.
Den_VR wrote 1 day ago:
So payroll for R&D is now entirely tax deductible? Businesses get
to choose to pay taxes or do R&D for themselves?
alphazard wrote 1 day ago:
Tax deductible is a weird way of phrasing it. It's not like these
software companies were counting their money at the end of the
quarter, and then deciding to do R&D instead of paying taxes.
They had already paid R&D expenses to build the product, which
gained them revenue. Previously they weren't allowed to
actualize the cost of R&D all at once, so the business could be
losing money, and still have to pay taxes on top of the loss
(which is nuts).
This fixes the problem, so now if you spend $100 on software
developers, and you make $100 from the software, then you have $0
income, instead of $80 income.
tomrod wrote 1 day ago:
It was also weird because people pay money on income (dividend,
partner payment, SCorp share, etc.) anyway, so in a long term
view this incentivized companies to keep fewer software
engineers on staff.
n_u wrote 1 day ago:
It’s more about whether or not the company has taxable profits
for that year (importantly these are not the same as real
profits). I would read this article to understand more about how
being forced to amortize tax deductions for expenses affects a
business’s taxes. [1] more info here too
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
lazide wrote 1 day ago:
Either scenario taxes are paid - it’s just how and over what
time period.
tomrod wrote 1 day ago:
In the long run, we are all dead. 20% depreciation per year for
any software developed is a burden for all but the largest of
companies.
bobmcnamara wrote 1 day ago:
This matched capex software.
Weird how the depreciation schedule changes based on how the
software was acquired.
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