[rbultje]

This is a weird take. Employees are supposed to be business expenses, that's the core idea of running a business: profit = revenue - expenses, where expenses are personnel / materials, and pay taxes over profit. Since the R&D change, businesses can't fully expense employees and need to pay (business) taxes over their salaries. Employees - of course - still pay personal taxes also (as was always the case).

[e40]

Yeah, free is a bit of a odd take. ! ZIRP + section 174 was a huge simultaneous blow to tech.

I would add one more: me too-ism from CEOs following Musk after the twitter reductions. I think many tech CEOs (e.g., Zuck) hate their workforce with a passion and used the layoff culture to unwind things and bring their workforce to heel (you might be less vocal in this sort of environment... think of the activists that used to work at Google).

[Lu2025]

> me too-ism from CEOs following Musk after the twitter reductions

I see evidence of a collusion. My friends at several tech companies (software and hardware) received very similar sounding emails in similar time frame. I think the goal was "salary compression". Management was terrified of the turnover and salary growth so they decided to act. They threw a bunch of people on the labor market at once to cool it down. It would normalize eventually but you don't need long. Fired H1-B holders have to find a new job within 2 months or self deport.

[e40]

Totally agree. They wanted to mess with supply/demand to lower salaries. A lot of very highly paid people were laid off or forced out. RTO is really about shedding people, too, so let's not forget about that.

[woke_ai_god]

We know all of these tech CEO's were on group chats with each other planning for how to install Trump as monarch. I would think, if you had several billionaires and industry leaders all participating day in and day out in the same secret group chats with each other, it would not be that difficult for them to coordinate layoffs with each other. Turning it from competition against each other for labor, to a cartel which just attempts to break the labor supply.

[sharpshadow]

If a software engineer in a R&D project is using a AI service to develop the software, does the bill count as company business expense or does it fall under section 174?