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Comment by throwawaybbq1 | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean a huge hiring uptick in the US/layoff reversal? I do think this law caused some of the bad market. Will undoing it get us back to where we were?

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Definitely not. Repealing section 174 (or not extending it, as it were) helped pushed us into a new normal for the market. Adding it back doesn't in and of itself push the market into another new normal, we'd need a lot more. It might take the edge off though, hopefully.

Agreed. Consider that we're in a big tech bubble right now (AI) and have been for at least a couple years. And yet tech layoffs have been way up, and hiring way down. Part of that that could be attributable to 174, but there are other issues that contribute more. One would be that there are vanishingly few people with actual experience in this narrow part of AI (LLMs) - I know people working in AI that have been laid off in the last couple of years because they were in the wrong area of AI (vision & CNNs). Secondly, it turns out that not that many people are needed to work on this stuff (mostly concentrated in large companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft & Amazon). And thirdly, folks in the C suite became convinced that AI is going to replace software engineers so they've quite hiring them.

> And thirdly, folks in the C suite became convinced that AI is going to replace software engineers so they've quite hiring them.

I think this is the real reason for much of the layoffs.

The other reason is simply that the market isn't punishing layoffs. You get rewarded as a CEO for laying off employees and saying "It's because AI makes them obsolete"

A huge uptick / reversal, I'm not sure, that's ultimately far more driven by actual profit / market than taxes.

But as pointed out in the article, US devs now have a tax advantage vs foreign devs. That may lead to some "nearshoring" especially from foreign markets where dev salaries have been jumping up (India, Europe, etc.)

I pray this is true. How can an experienced dev in the Bay area compete with someone in India that would work for $10 an hour with chatgpt?

Now that I write this, it's still a hard decision for big companies.

just be patient and wait for the off shore contractor's vibe coded shit pile to burst into flames and come in and fix shit for a big premium while being able to communicate with the customer during their preferred time zone and in the local dialect.

simple.

Most people cannot just wait around until this happens, there are bills to pay.

Most US devs are paying their bills. If you can't get a job even freelancing, do something else instead of waiting for the government to give you a handout job. Millions and millions of US devs are worth their salary over foreign ones (in fact many of those millions ARE foreign devs where it was worth paying to bring them here and paying them higher ages)

Same thing happened in the '90s...

I think what we're seeing is the fossilization of the newest batch of mega tech companies looking to rest on their laurels and prioritize profits over innovation.

They won't die, they are just the next IBM.

Because just anyone in India won't work for $10/hr and ChatGPT doesn't make any difference working in enormous big tech codebases with all in-house technologies

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