Hacker News Reader

Comment by spacecadet | Hacker News Reader

Please explain then. Because if you spend $2m on an idea, layoff half the company, pivot to a new idea, rehire. You think it's fair on the rest of us you get to write that risk off? This. Is. Why. People. Hate. Tech.

View on HN

I amortize a server because you buy it now, it does work, then is eventually obsolete and you toss it.

Does a developer keep doing work for me after he quits/dies?

The code you hired the developer to write/maintain should keep working for you after he quits/dies. Or you made a real bad investment.

Do you want hiring people to be considered as an investment?

I think that might have a lot of unintended side-effects.

With a startup you're running a search function. The code you hired the developer to write often does stop working because you've been forced to pivot as you search for product-market fit.

If we spend $1M in year one to build a platform, we will surely spend more than $1M in year two maintaining and extending it, and keep doing that until almost the day we finally abandon it. Depreciation might make sense when the actual investment was heavily front-loaded (compared to the revenue) but in our industry it almost never is.

Maybe? What if it was a one time manual test harness? What if it was a migration for a new client that has since quit? There is a pretty wide range of tasks a developer can do.

Pretty much everyone else works on the idea that salaries are operational expenses and not subject to amortization.

I have yet to see any other case of salaries being turned into Capital Expenses (aka something that requires amortization/depreciation). I'd understand if outsourcing (or otherwise contract work) would be treated as something to be amortized, but we're talking SALARIES.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com