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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Huge crash between 2022 and 2023, from 230 to down around 80. Why? That's the real question. What happened? It's post-COVID.

Then stuck in the 60-80 range since 2023. The sample period chosen by Citadel is wildly deceptive.

This is an important question and these crap stats are not helping.

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There was a change in US tax law that revoked the ability of software companies to classify engineer salaries as an R&D expense, which massively increased the tax liability for many software companies.

This is under-recognized by many folks. That full impact of the that aspect of the 2017 TCJA was hard to predict when it was so far in the future, and when it hit, we were dealing with the latter economic impact of covid in addition to these deduction changes.

This was reverted for us employees in OBBB and companies can refile taxes for what they couldn't use as an expense in the intervening time. I think the impact of this is generally overstated

It’s not a crash, but a huuuge peak around ‘22.

Well, yes, but we're still sitting at ~80% of 2020 levels. Perhaps just hangover from 2022, perhaps the end of ZIRP, but it's still depressed relative to 2020.

There was a hiring bubble in 2022 just before the Fed raised interest rates. I'm not understanding what the mystery is.

The link you're responding to has the option to zoom out more to 2020. If you scroll down to view the other related graphs, you'll find that they also index 2020 as a starting point because they're all tracking this hiring bubble.

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