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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023.

But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending.

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My first and only layoff was effective 1h before that law went into effect. 1,000s of us were shunted off b/c an entire research arm was canned due to the changing cost of research s/w teams.

I'm poorer but happier now b/c of it. That job was nuts.

I took a decent sized pay cut about 6 years ago to join a small company and build out our own product knowing that I may not get a raise for awhile but got to work on something cool with people I liked and I haven't regreted it for a moment. Looking forward to waking up to do work is a wild feeling.

I’m kind of doing this right now for the first time as a founding engineer in a very small but tight knit team. On paper, I’m objectively in a less secure position, but holy shit is it nice to enjoy work consistently.

I haven't dreaded going to work in years. I also realized burnout is less about how much time you're putting in and much more about how that time is spent. And when I had micromanaging bosses every hour felt like 4.

I'm with you. I don't think we talk enough about careerism and how toxic it can be.

100%. It doesn’t pay the same kind of bills but it makes life 1000% better.

Agreed. I'm comfortable and occasionally get envious of the salaries others are posting but it's fleeting.

> My first and only layoff

Won't be your last.

The layoffs are happening all over, not just in USA. Atlassian has cut jobs. Spotify. Wisetech. Xero. It's happening all over. This is not a USA tax policy problem.

What could possibly trigger people to down vote this absolutely neutral, and 100% factual, normal post? Cant the moderators not explain, than down voting is not for things you don't agree with?

While factually correct, the US tax change was a huge driver of global layoffs. And the original comment didn’t just mention US tax policy as a source of layoffs, and the alternative source provided would apply globally.

The tax change impacted US company spend on their overseas businesses, so of course they’d be impacted, and it would indirectly impact overseas supplies of domestic business. Beyond that, it sets a tone and many in business are quick to follow the behaviors of others.

Uh, downvoting is definitely a useful tool to signal that you don’t agree with an opinion or subjective statement.

But yes, downvoting a factual statement makes no sense.

That's just silly. The fact that you disagree with an opinion does not mean that other people should not get the chance to be exposed to it. That's how echo-chambers form.

At the same time, the amount of disagreement an opinion gathers is an extremely important channel of information for determining whether you agree with someone's position. Silencing the disagreement with it gives an outsized benefit to harmful and malicious statements.

That's fine when a disagreement (or downvote) is just a signal on the post, but when it's used as a way to silence an opinion (e.g downvotes will hide it) that's even more harmful and malicious. Especially when the guideline is to downvote posts that are low-quality or don't conform to the rules, not posts you just merely disagree with or are against your belief system. Popularity should not be confused with truth.

That tax change got reversed!

Proof? I don’t believe it did.

Edit: BBB? Is it in effect yet, though?

Not an accountant, but I believe that it is. https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/corporates/sectio...

> The One Big Beautiful Bill Act introduces Section 174A, which restores immediate deduction of domestic research and experimental expenditures starting in tax years beginning after December 31, 2024, reversing the controversial five-year amortization requirement that took effect in 2022.

See https://www.striketax.com/journal/section-174-amortization-r...

Yes, and it went into effect retroactively for all of 2025.

Yes.

The R&D tax credit change actually took effect in 2022, and one of the few good things Trump's BBB did was reverse it

This is true as stated. However, it is important context that the time bomb was originally introduced in Trump's signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in his first term. So, yes, Trump's OBBBA fixed it, but Trump's TCJA caused it in the first place, too.

This is a fair criticism and I am not defending the practice. My understanding is that time-bombs like this are very regularly introduced into all sorts of bills, party-agnostic. It's how they can say things like "We saved $X over Y years!" where a lot of the time-bombs go off half-way through the 'Y-years" bit unless renewed.

Please correct if I'm wrong about this. I only know what I read, which is hard to trust anymore.

They’ve been regularly introduced in a party-agnostic way, exclusively by republicans. But yea, “party agnostic”.

You should look up the American rescue plan and reflect on why the government shut down recently.

It only reversed it for within the US, I learned that when the company I worked for (owner was a US company) closed.

Right, you can only deduct R&D expenses that happen inside the U.S.

If you want to do R&D overseas, best to set up an overseas company.

Trump takes credit for fixing problems that he created in the first place.

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