I think it's the BBB that fixed the tax code issue - just a guess.
But my colleagues are all younger than me - they are hiring people out of college too, so you can make it just keep pushing
It was put into law in 2017 with the Republican TCJA, but section 174 was time-delayed, part of a general trick of having all of the tax-cuts and spending immediately, with any budget "balancing" items deferred as long as possible.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/118-2024/s230
> Why didn't the Democrats
Alternate question: Why didn't the Republicans do something in the years before 2025 to fix the problem they created and which tech-company lobbyists absolutely told them about?
Democrats could've passed a bill that only included the repeal of the R&D changes, which they didn't coz they didn't want to.
Edit: rate limited coz of politically motivated downvotes, I am done here.
This feels like the "only Democrats have agency" story, where Republicans are somehow never to blame because they're just toddlers or forces of nature, while Democrats are always at fault because they didn't stop the Republicans from burning the house down or clean up all the poop from the carpets or whatever, in an endless and impossible race.
By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
> That wasn't a clean bill
Well, that one happens to be a bill from a Republican, I was just looking for ones that affected that tax-provision.
In any case, did you check out the table-of-contents, and not just the page-length? It may not be as minimal-as-possible, but it's all tax-related stuff.
Because only Democrats had agency when the law took effect? The president can veto any bill. Democrats passed two bills in 2021 and 2022 with zero Republican votes, zero, they could've easily included the repeal in those bills if they wanted to. They didn't coz they didn't want to, their stated policy is to raise taxes on corporations, how is this even debatable? Meanwhile the Republicans at that time had no agency. Once they got agency, they repealed it immediately, with zero Democrat votes.
Would you similarly blame the Democrats for all voting against the repeal as part of the BBB that just passed? You wouldn't and your reason would be "but the BBB contained a lot of other things apart from this repeal that the dems didn't like". Why won't you apply the same logic to the non-clean bill you brought up?
> By your logic, Republicans didn't fix it because they didn't want to either! Why was that? Partisan vengeance against California?
Huh, they fixed it immediately after coming to power. They couldn't fix it before the BBB because it needed to go in reconciliation because the dems don't suppor the repeal. They didn't fix it in 2019 because it wasn't even in effect yet and IIRC dems had the house. So how does the partisan vengeance allegation even make any sense?
What evidence led you to that conclusion? It feels like there's some Fundamental Attribution Error [1] going on here, where Republicans are getting a free-pass for the pain they created "because there were circumstances" (which is true) but somehow Democrats failing to remove the pain is automatically "because they wanted it that way."
I already shared some opposing evidence, that Republican-sponsored Senate bill with a repeal in it that still garnered strong (but not unanimous) Democratic support.
Here's another: Section-174 relief was originally included in the 2021 "Build Back Better" act, but--due to those tight partisan vote margins--a particular conservative-leaning Democrat (who later left the party!) decided to prevent it [0]:
> With the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) being all but dead in the Senate after Joe Manchin’s unexpected rejection of the bill, concerns remain high regarding the future of Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code. [...] But, with Senator Manchin’s refusal to support the BBBA, the legislation is now on its last breath, although the Biden administration remains optimistic that there is a chance of getting a modified version of the bill passed.
[0] https://www.claconnect.com/en/resources/blogs/uncertainty-co...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
They controlled the Senate and the Presidency, and never allowed a clean bill(one introduced by Marco Rubio which was killed in the Dem controlled Senate committee) that restored the exception to come to vote. The Republicans came to power and immediately restored it, with zero Democrat votes.
This is not how HN works. I posted an explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44920494.
That's when the layoff spree started!
Hopefully things are looking up for the market.
Edit: Republican Marco Rubio introduced a clean bill to repeal the changes in 2023.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/282...
The Democrat controlled Senate blocked it from coming to a vote.
Why does HN always blame only Republicans for this change?
Repealing it had Republican support during the Biden term too, they even introduced a bill in2023 to repeal it which the Democrats killed.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/282...
Democrats really wanted the changes to take place since their platform is all about higher taxes on companies and high earners.
Do you have a source for this claim?
The congressional record says only that it died in the Finance Committee
Edit: Blocked from being able to post new comments by HN because I am getting heavily downvoted for posting inconvenient facts and arguments. Stay classy, HN.
> The Senate Finance Committee roster for the 118th Congress includes 14 Democrats and 13 Republicans, with three new GOP members recently appointed.
> https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/senate-finance-finalizes...
Hardly an unbeatable majority for Democrats on this committee. Especially since research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
I think it's not as clear cut as "the Democrats" or "the Republicans" here-- especially since there would probably be a requirement that the shortfall be made up in some other way in order to balance the effects on revenue.
For the 10th time in this thread, the repealing bill DID NOT need to be revenue neutral since it had Republican support, all it needed was 60 votes in the Senate. Reconciliation only applies if a yearly budget bill can get at least 51 votes but not 60.
Sorry, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. I stated the same in another comment and was downvoted. I know HN is liberal biased but it's becoming unusable if you as much dare to criticize democrats.
As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference.
> As stated above, it was 14 to 13 by party lines in this committee, and that's a negligible difference
There were only 27 members in the committee. So all the Democrats on the committee voted against the repeal and all the republicans voted for the repeal.
How is that a negligible difference? That's a massive maximum difference between the parties, in fact it was impossible to have a higher difference.
Is this situation right now really "unusable"? Aren't you overreacting just a tad? People might disagree with you, I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation without getting upset.
Quite literally unusable because I got blocked by HN from commenting for more than two hours coz of all the politically motivated downvotes. If you have the right politics, keep commenting!
> I'd hope you'd be able to have a conversation
See above, literally not able to have one because I dared to criticize Democrats for their actions and inactions that led to tech job losses for over two years.
> People might disagree with you
I'm open to arguments but looks like people disagree with the facts that I am bringing forward, so they're downvoting to suppress them to lower visibility and to discourage me from participating on here.
It's like on Reddit when you state a plain fact 'Musk founded SpaceX' in reply to a highly upvoted comment that said 'Musk bought all this companies' and get heavily downvoted and even permanently banned in large subs by highly biased moderators.
This place is turning into yet another BlueSky or Reddit where facts don't matter and only a one sided political narrative is pushed at all times. Don't think it's worth engaging. I don't want to be in a place where my comments are deemed so terrible that I get max downvoted and then unable to comment for several hours.
Ironically, such controlling behavior and shutting down of facts, criticism of one side and conversation is leading more and more people to vote for the other side. I am now ashamed of being a lifelong liberal and won't vote democrat till people change this obnoxious partisan behavior on platforms like this one.
Hacker News is far from a bastion of left wingers, many people have complained about liberal and progressive ideas being downvoted as well. Above all, this platform isn't made for political debate, and it is not encouraged. If it makes you feel better, not a single one of my posts in all this has much or any upvotes. If you are looking for political validation, this ain't the place for it.
For example, not a single person has addressed the fact that that the Democrats platform is to raise taxes on corporations, which this change accomplished during their watch. So I have to keep bringing it up. People are downvoting facts that they don't like, for political reasons and to reduce visibility.
Anyway you're right, this is not worth my time or effort. There is no open exchange of facts or ideas, it's just party line downvoting to suppress them. It's best not to engage at all, just like all the others with alternate viewpoints that stopped engaging on here. That's what the downvoters want anyway, they win. The only way I can possibly make a difference to combat this behavior is changing how I vote at the ballot box.
> [Deductions on] research and development is one of the main reasons taxation on higher income classes is effective: The idea is you'll be taxed if you want to take it as profit, but if you advance the state of the art, innovate, or create new technology then you can deduct that. The high tax rates of the US post WWII up to Reagan worked so well because of this combination: It was incentivized for businesses to reinvest their profits into R&D, since they'd hopefully be able to scale their profits if the R&D was successful.
Even after this recent change by Republicans, increasing corporate taxes(say after the 2028 elections if Democrats are elected) means there is less money leftover to spend on R&D.
You misunderstand how tax exemptions work.
When you make money, you need to pay taxes on that money. However, if you spend that money in certain ways, the tax code lets you take that amount of money and _deduct_ it from your overall taxable income. Thus, you pay taxes on _less_ of the money you earned. Imagine the tax rate was 100%, but you could deduct 100% of R&E expenses, and you spent 100% of your income on R&E. You would pay zero dollars in taxes.
No. The Democrats added a new minimum corporate tax last time they were in power. As I have to keep repeating, their policies and actions are all about taxing companies more which why they didn't repeal the R&D exemption removal. They consider it a tax loophole that companies abuse to pay less taxes.
Kamala's proposal was to increase the minimum corporate further.
https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-news/crapo-criticizes-atte...
Needless to say, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the BBB’s ~$4 trillion debt increase.
While it is a different bill, the fact the Democrats were fine having it in the bill passed by the House in 2024 does cast doubt on this notion that they didn't try to resolve the issue.
This is not how HN works. Rate-limiting only happens when an account posts high volumes of comments that break the guidelines. It's nothing to do with downvotes or the political/idological flavor of what you post (we don't care and often don't know; all we care about is whether you're filling up threads with guideline-breaking comments, which is what ruins threads).
If you want rate-limiting turned off you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we can discuss it.
Another possibility is that it triggers when a moderator gets pissed at a single one of your comments.
The rate-limiter is applied manually when we notice that an account is posting a high volume of guidelines-breaking comments. The way we notice is by reading the threads, which we spend much of each day doing, or when we're alerted to guidelines-breaking comments by flags or by community members emailing us.
So to answer your question, Republicans repealed it with zero Democratic votes because they included it in the once-a-year reconciliation bill. The bill that you are linking to would not have met this criteria.
That is a bit of a jump. It wasn’t too long ago we had the Republicans vote against their own bill.
There was no way for the Republicans to stop a bill from coming to vote. And there were multiple republican co-sponsors or even bills introduced by them to repeal the provisions. It didn't even get to a vote because the dems killed the efforts. They like higher corporate taxes so it tracks, they didn't care about the damage caused. Once the Repulicans were able to repeal it on their own, they immediately did it ASAP.
There were some legendary filibusters back in the day. One famous example was when Strom Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights act by speaking for 24 hours continuously. He was not able to block the bill by continuing to speak because there are limits to how long someone is able to stand and deliver, and originally if you stopped speaking you had to yield the floor and allow business to proceed.
of the statute they wrote, voted for, and signed into law. Important note.
This process was used several times to pass key and major bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, Trump's tax bill in 2017, the big beautiful bill last month etc.
Dems did not need 60 votes to restore the R&D exemption changes. They could've just included it in the reconciliation bills they passed with just 50 votes because it qualifies as a budgetary change. That's exactly how the Republicans got it done recently after getting back in power, with zero Dem votes for this change.
You completely missed that in your comment so I was trying to add some information.
They had the chance to repeal it before it would have taken effect.
Why do they get zero blame on here?
But the Republicans made this change to start with. That's a lot of blame. And if they did it just to create a political firestorm against Democrats later (which is exactly what they did), do we (A) recognize that politicians shouldn't be using Americans as cannon fodder to damage their political enemies or (B) blame their political enemies?
It gives advantage to bad actors.
Both sides are the same, Republicans destroy things and Democrats are not perfect in stopping and fixing them! "I am gonna support Republicans as they create problems and then blame Democrats" just makes you someone who intentionally creates problems.
So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.
Definitely a much better tax situation but also not one we would've been in if not for the TCJA, and we still have an exposed oblique (the removal of the domestic research exclusion) that could put us back in the same spot unless the software development as research section is removed.
But not a surprise based on your history here on HN.
Farming, healthcare, autos, etc are almost completely subsidized by the government.
Serious question: who is producing reliable numbers now? The Trump administration is actively suppressing federal reporting and openly threatening to cease collecting and reporting data,
and this is absolutely signaling to sycophants and supporters that they should falsify or withhold unflattering data.
This is a truly terrible timeline.
Would you be able to guess without looking what top-level category contains Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, or Google?
"In contrast, professional and business services were down 7,100 jobs in July, the worst of any sector, and the tech-heavy information sector lost 1,000 jobs."
This could be many things. People could be leaving to do their own startups. The BLS counts that as a job loss thus high-velocity sectors can be reported as job loss.
The real problem, IMO, is that workers in the tech industry have voluntarily destroyed these agglomeration benefits by using the short period of power workers had during/after the pandemic to insist on work from home instead of better worker protections.
As a result, it’s very possible that high productivity areas in the U.S. are no longer that, and remote work has reduced all Americana’s productivity, making it impossible to justify the higher cost of living and salaries in big cities.
But it was hot. My time back in coastal California has been mostly in the 70s. Camping in Marin County this week, the high was in the 60s. Refreshing after heat warnings in Nebraska, Illinois and Ontario.
I do agree there is no winter in the SF bay though. That’s pretty nice.
100 degrees is unusual although it happens. I never lived in the South Bay so can't speak about AC. My house, built in 1947, didn't have it. It was a pain, maybe 2 weeks of the year, at most. It was in the 50s, most days of the year. Low at night in the summer, high in the winter.
I had early guidance that the climate was mild and I would live in a smaller house than I was used to but I would be outside all year. Check.
I didn't understand that there are only two seasons: spring when it rained sometimes and summer when it didn't rain but might be foggy in the morning.
My first year, I craved the rain after six months without. I've adjusted although the first seasonal rain is enjoyable like the first snow in the Midwest. But I don't miss the next 6 months of Midwest winter.
Plus BLS household survey probably has some non-response bias from it re: high income, low time individuals, precisely the folks chiming in.
Sad to see that to some extent that's exactly what happened. My current tech take is that developers shouldn't allow AI and/or agents to do the entirety of their job, rather allow them to do more, and it should be framed as such specifically. e.g. don't use AI to write the entire feature, use it to make the feature better and drive more revenue, or more correct and result in less bugs, thus less wasted effort on ops/etc.
It's amusing to see some people excited for AI to do the entirety of the implementation and planning, as if there would be no impact on us. If AI is that good, you just need TPMs (to the extent it's even possible, anyway).
It's no surprise to see that jobs that cannot be done remotely are making a comeback.
You can keep your current H1-Bs, but no more for you for 5 years if you do a layoff.
If you are laying workers off you clearly don't need additional H1B workers. You should be barred for at least a year if not more from putting in any applications for H1B after any major layoff.
It should also be scrutinized if you preferably fire local workers over your H1B workers. Anybody caught doing so should be barred from H1B for a decade.
I like my H1B coworkers, but things have gone too far. You can't do layoffs and simultaneously put in applications for thousands of H1B workers. It makes no logical sense and should be illegal. The system is completely broken right now.
Not to mention most of this H1B work is not actually due to lack of local talent. Building a web or mobile app is not rocket science and there are plenty of people capable of doing so. Any company putting in H1B for anything but research positions or positions requiring exceptional expertise is probably abusing the system.
Love your thinking here. Total agreement.
And yeah I have had great experiences with my H1B coworkers, but they are doing jobs that US professionals could easily do. At this point H1Bs are just (possibly unwitting?) scab labor.
Time to cull the waterloo crowd and maybe think twice about cheap outsourcing to latam and india.
In my opinion, outsourcing is a larger evil. The money used to pay the salaries of outsourced engineers should be taxed at-least at 20% (along with remittances to India) akin to what we currently penalize foreign countries for maliciously suppressing the cost of physical goods. This is called Countervailing Duty or Anti Dumping Duty penalties.
I've reached my limit with the entitlement of these people in the united states. Especially systematically excluding americans or non-indians once they reach a hiring level / role.
Many of the best coworkers I've had the pleasure of working with, not to mention the founders of the company I spent over a quarter of my career at (Pagerduty).
Disclosure: I'm a US citizen with multiple CS degree from MIT and my son is studying CS at Waterloo now.
My rule of thumb is if I'm the smartest person in the room then we've got serious problems.
Oh well, better tell em all to go back. Might as well tell our allies to rearm because we’re worried about being ripped off. I for one will not feel ripped off when Germany has a functioning military again. It has always gone well for the planet when Europe is armed and angry
Are implying that reducing the number of graduates from a single program (CS) at one specific university (Waterloo) from a country 10x smaller from the US (Canada) will help lower tech employment in California?
In practical terms this would look like eliminating H1B/O1 programs.
Non-resident visa holders are not citizens and act accordingly against the interests of citizens and their families.
Half kidding of course, but AFAIK many industries went through such a transformation and today most social and political issues stem from those areas that once were affluent lost their industries. Why not the software too?
“But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. ”
I’d like a follow up article when I’m guessing a good chunk of these writers were hired back when their managers realized ChatGPT can’t help replace real creative writing output. It can only create more dead internet spaces that don’t make money long term.
There will always be bad managers making shitty decisions and journalists and CEO's eager to confirm a narrative, AI or no-AI
Source: Building an AI production studio myself and the first thing we had to do was hire writers to drive the creative effort.
- The type of job is eliminated due to AI
- The amount of people doing a type of job is substantially reduced because AI increases the productivity of people in that role and companies can do the same amount of that work with less people
I think the former is extremely limited so far, but the latter is pretty substantial. I didn't downvote you, but I imagine the people that did probably did so to reject the former argument.
I don't understand being this willfully naive, especially if you support AI, because using it to replace jobs is the entire selling point. No company wants AI for any other reason, and every company wants AI.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI. I don't like that I have to use it sometimes, and I think we were better off without it, but so far it hasn't hurt me. It's definitely made me way less employable in the traditional sense. I feel sorry for the new grads/self taught people trying to get jobs.
If the company has a legal monopoly that prevents competition, sure. Otherwise, unless they're dumb and want to risk the other two leaving, they'll task all 4 of them to use the AI to accomplish things that were infeasible or uneconomical before, to try win market share or increase margins.
This might be the case at startups.
For mid to larger size companies very often it is though: "we have X amount of work/projects/maintenance/support to do. How many people do we need and how much do we need to budget for that? Oh we need about 4? Will 400,000$ do? Okay let's go". In this case yes. If a $200/month AI subscription can bring those 4 people down to 3 or even 2 of course the company will lay off.
Not op, but…
Just because a company is profitable doesn’t mean that they make good decisions around hiring.
As a person of color this is even more detestable.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-startups-hiring-us-workers-30f...
I don't understand how Trump is allowing anything with headline like this.
I do wonder if the last election would have gone differently if all the people directly and indirectly affected by that hadn't been.
They did try, incorporating some relief into a bill in 2021, however:
> In the House version of the Build Back Better Act passed in November 2021, the effective date for the amendment made by the TCJA to Section 174 was delayed until tax years beginning after December 31, 2025. While this specific provision of the bill enjoyed broad bipartisan support, comments made by Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) in late December indicating his opposition to the bill effectively stalled progress on the Build Back Better Act, making the path forward on legislation unclear.
-- https://www.bdo.com/insights/tax/significant-change-to-the-t...
That bill did narrowly survive, but only in a stripped-down form with that Section-174 provision removed to satisfy the Senate fence-sitters. Manchin later left the Democratic party.
Clinton just didn't do anything serious which could reverse this, and other Republican actions are what "allowed" further Chinese growth rates than that.
IOW almost anybody who had any influence was allowing prosperity to recede from our shores more so than Clinton.
not my downvote btw
Since skin color somehow matters /s
The idea that now Trump (or anyone, for that matter) wants to bail-out American chipmaking is laughable. Intel bet wrong, and now all of America has to satisfy itself with being critically reliant on Taiwan for our highest-margin products. You don't have to blame Trump, but there's no reason any corrective action shouldn't have been done during the first term. We either let Intel drown or send them a government-issued life raft - we can't teach them to swim from underwater.
For all the pro-WFH/fully remote developers on HN who live in North America, you're going to be in for a surprise when your company decides to replace you with someone living in another country. Why hire you when the company can hire someone who costs 1/5 of you and is willing to work harder without complaining? Both of you are remote anyway. So what if the new hire works at night and sleeps during the day?
For all pro-WFH/fully remote developers living in North America, you should be cheering for return to office mandates. It'll probably save your career long-term.
Remote work during covid improved remote management and communication, which is needed to fully outsource workers.
Important roles at multinationals are therefore hired in the USA. Even though all countries are officially "equal" in the eyes of a multinational, with salary based on market conditions/cost of living, in practice developers at the same job level have very different impacts. This has been true for decades.
I don't think this dynamic will change even in a WFH/remote environment because it's a great excuse for companies to reward engineers differently based on impact while still preserving job title equality.
It's similar to manufacturing in Germany. Salaries are higher so it naturally attracts talent. You can get things cheaper abroad, and many do, but if you want it done right...
I've been working fully remote for 10 years and the company hires people from almost anywhere in the world. They'd get to pick the best candidate regardless of their location. Pay is also not based on where you're living but on the role and your experience.
Outsourcing dev work to India because it's "cheaper" has already maximally happened since decades ago.
So if your theory was correct there'd be almost no western developers by now. And yet there they are, making half a million a year working for big tech in California.
The only way your position can pass even a basic sense check is that you mean you think these companies are paying 5x just to see their devs in person?
Job market is better for seniors right now but that’s mostly because employers can sometimes hire a senior for money they would pay to a junior during late COVID boom.
>So what if the guy works night and sleep days
is what you said in another comment and it has a lot to do with working with others to the point where I see remote jobs specify what time zones you can live in so that you have overlap with the rest of the team. Everyone whose worked with coworkers on a completely different shift than you knows how often simple tasks turn into 3 days events simply from the cycle of
Send request -> clarifying question is sent back -> send clarification taking an entire 24 hours for each step to resolve
I feel like this supports my theory.
You also get into the grey area of if it counts as a remote team if every member of the team is located in a different regional office.
> already maximally happened since decades ago
We just laid off ~4000 employees and are replacing them with hiring in India. Your notion that it already happened decades ago is wrong.
Cycle of life continues
USA based ones have some advantages, like the timezone and the familiarity to the culture but both of these things are actually fixable and when fixed it saves a lot of money. I came to conclusion that US based developers must be thinking that they are better than everyone and that's why they are being paid these salaries.
Then integrating a whole subsystem into the actual product, same deal. I spend as much time holding a wrench or a meter as I do writing code.
This is very hard to outsource.
I skipped the whole webdev movement. Closest I got was using Wt (C++) to make an engineering interface for a system once, so non-engineers could actuate relays and devices.
I do think I’m better than most people at this. I don’t think it can be outsourced, and I am not concerned.
People can argue about the latest js framework or how amazing rust is for the next 15 years, at which point I plan on retiring.
This type of work is largely recession-proof and offshoring-proof.
The return to office mandates were mostly a power play and a cost saving measure.
The rust belt actually does quite well with tourism, though my research for responding to your comment seems to indicate to me that tourism is important everywhere.
I'm a native Michigander and long-time Californian (both subject to booms/busts) who recently took a road trip to the Midwest and back. If it weren't for family and friends, I probably wouldn't venture east of the 100th parallel. I was surprised by this.
I'm going to guess that the people who think the entire state looks like LA in 1992 probably weren't going to vacation here in the first place.
- Schwarzenegger - Homelessness - Fires
Of course, since I’ve been in America several times, I know that reality is completely different than what average for example Hungarian knows about America.
And even as I read a lot of American news, my first longer talk with a religiously Trump supporter was eye opening. So people in other countries need to tackle several layers of distortions to know what’s really happening there.
But of course that’s true for every single country.
This article is a couple years old, so maybe things have started to turn around from the investments that were made, but reputations take time to change, as good news doesn’t get reported on nearly as often as bad news.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/business/san-francisco-union-...
Would it be any worse than the Dot-com bust?
We're rewriting the belt.
With software any body can build and put something out there (ignoring quality and tech debt and taste etc). Where software might go the way of manufacturing is when price of ai actually reflects hardware costs (my estimates of the realistic Claude max pricing at cost is between 7-10k and month). Now put together other structures that will come up to "industrialize" ai+software software may not have easy entries sadly.
It’s not even “bias.” It’s an odd form of white supremacy that views whites as above having material interests of their own. “It’s okay to be unfair to white people because they don’t need it like we do.”
I make the clarification because I’ve noticed it even among people who don’t have in-group bias. My mom quite dislikes other Bangladeshis, but only slowly realized over 30 years of living here that there are white-majority parts of the country with real economic challenges.
If its the former, I am not sure what you are trying to convey.
For myself - seasoned engineer, european pursuasion, I want to work with people that are open and collaborative. I've worked with backgrounds like mine I would never work with again.
I do have an issue with employers find an excuse to bias towards the lower cost labor pool that is H1s. And when teams get saturated that way, it perpetuates the same.
These days, I have found large companies with a tech component and smaller companies within tech centers are more diverse/inclusive (as you will) than the FAANG type companies.
It’s hard to articulate because it’s more an absence of thought. Imagine robots run the world and tell humans what to do. You wouldn’t really think about the robots, and you wouldn’t think about their material interests. That’s kind of like how many desis view white people.
For example, consider the domination of the motel industry by Gujrati Patels: https://madrascourier.com/insight/how-gujarati-patels-took-o.... I suspect they don’t think of themselves as being “biased” by favoring other Gujratis. They don’t think about fairness to white people because why would you think about fairness towards your robot overlords?
This is also an interesting way to explain the self-immolating Whites, which nowadays is most of us. Any sort of White group identity or collective interest is absolute heresy which must be opposed, while all things in the collective interest of non-Whites must be celebrated, encouraged, and helped along at our own expense. There's a certain paternalistic arrogance to it, an ethnocentric assumption that other races can't get on without us. And it's much more common and pervasive than the caricature of the like shaved head neo-Nazi we are all expected to imagine exists in large numbers, somewhere.
If I am understanding right, you are not wrong. A group gets a manager of a certain cultural background (visa or not), the team hiring practice trends that way. Companies do not question this...They should.
Diversity in age, culture, ethnic background and experience build a better team.
The unfortunate thing is there are a few cultures that benefit from H1 visas (most prevalent) and propagate their leanings over being open.
American companies should be doing more to hire non-H1s, there is not a talent shortage, but they would rather not pay that additional percentage.
In the less glib way, I'll draw attention to the fact that machine learning roles are only one moving part of the machinery required to manage, operate, train, evaluate, demo, and integrate AI adjacent opportunities. That's to say one need not be a pytorch or differential equation ninja to contribute meaningful to riding the hype train
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-commissioner-of-lab...
It's not helpful to just talk about absolute numbers of jobs gained or lost in a sector without talking about percentages and historical variability.
It also appears the California number cited is based on a survey of ~4K people, some reporting they can't find work, while e.g., Federal unemployment is a function of people getting unemployment benefits. Do states do the same surveys with the same methodology, so the numbers are comparable? Likely not. So the term seems to be used in different senses, and "worst in the US" is unsupported.
Further, for tech in particular, it's not clear which jobs were converted to contracts, for AI services or outsourcing (in or out of US).
This kind of salad article is likely the future: enough for the general public worried about jobs, but not helpful to anyone who actually wants to understand and plan accordingly.
From the link: Employment and Unemployment in California (Based on a monthly federal survey of 4,400 California households which focuses on workers in the economy)
This is federal not state data.
Federal unemployment data is based on this said survey. This link explicitly debunks that myth: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
I'm not sure about the thesis that this is primarily fallout from free money and suppressed interest rates though. That was really a '22 story, and even with long and variable lags, that element has been in play for a while now.
Oversupply of talent definitely sounds like a good argument though. I'll posit there has been some disruption by recent developments in the industry. Also, while metaverse and crypto startups may be passe, the AI scene has disgusting amounts of hype and money, and crypto ain't dead either, which brings me back to the earlier point that I do think some disruption is there to fill the gap in the narrative.
Even as interest rates went up the VCs still had committed funds to distribute for a year to 18 months. Then the biotechs had runway for 1-2 years from that. Now that’s all gone, and they can’t raise their next series. In the meantime, C> plus synbio is recently having a lower win rate than hoped for.
That plus all the money that is there is all going to AI companies due to the shorter time to return / higher potential roic / hype.
I think Elon's takeover of twitter set something of a precedent too: if he could reduce headcount as much as he did and still have a functioning product, then why can't I?
BTW I also don't think it has much to do with that engineering tax deferral code change that people keep talking about. My cynical hunch is that that topic keeps getting seeded by the billionaires who have the most to gain by reversing it, and hey maybe they'll hire an extra engineer or two afterward just to be good sports, but it's not going to reverse any major employment trends.
1. Rise of remote work: sure, it was there in some form. But prior to 2020, state of the remote work tools was abysmal. The prevalent culture was also about hiring the whole teams. After covid, remote work tools are far better. And companies learned to onboard one new remote hire at a time which over time is now allowing them to replace US workers with cheap overseas ones at a manageable pace.
2. end of cheap money - if the risk free rate is 4-5%, the demand from risky ventures like software startups is going to go up. So funding has dried up at the margins.
3. rise in the discount rate - related to the previous point, the discount rate one applies to investments have gone up. That means startups valued at 1B are now valued only at a few hundred millions. So to avoid down or flat rounds, startups have to cut costs drastically and show profitability to justify a higher valuation. Cue all the job cuts, belt tightening and death marches with a skeleton crew.
4. rise of AI - AI is helping with productivity of coding and non-coding tasks. It is also acting as an excuse for #3 when laying people off.
In my experience, all these are meaningful factors for the abysmal state of the developer market.
I think most of the trends we are seeing started around 2022, but if AI delivers on its promise things may accelerate in the coming years.
AI is a big factor.
nextworddev•5mo ago
seanmcdirmid•5mo ago
rafram•5mo ago
vitaflo•5mo ago
AstroBen•5mo ago
__turbobrew__•5mo ago
If you stick a low experience human in front of an AI the human does not know if the AI is spewing nonsense and therefore sometimes you will get nonsense from the process.
nextworddev•5mo ago
0cf8612b2e1e•5mo ago
FollowingTheDao•5mo ago
https://www.apollotechnical.com/ghost-jobs-in-tech-why-compa...
Der_Einzige•5mo ago
littlexsparkee•5mo ago
__loam•5mo ago
esseph•5mo ago
Every business uses tech.
R&D tax credit problem fixed, now development starts to get back on track at a lot of companies.
Esophagus4•5mo ago
So yes, companies are hiring, but it’s hard to get hired right now because of the volume of candidates.
Not impossible, but definitely harder.
darth_avocado•5mo ago
nextworddev•5mo ago
999900000999•5mo ago
2020 I was making about 80k more, even though I got that job through a combination of networking and luck.
My budget is less ball out and more it's nice I covered my rent
scarface_74•5mo ago
darth_avocado•5mo ago
giantg2•5mo ago
mertleee•5mo ago
scythe•5mo ago
rufus_foreman•5mo ago
In the long term. But in the long term we're all dead.
I only have one social media account, LinkedIn, and I have that account because I wanted to help people that got laid off from the company I worked for who were good, but were definitely not getting hired in 2008. There were developers who were top notch, but they weren't getting hired, they were sitting there not working getting poorer, frustrated and divorced.
I'm on my last job so I have no idea what the job market is like now, don't know don't care, but no. There are times when even the best developers can't even get a phone interview.
AstroBen•5mo ago
littlexsparkee•5mo ago
AstroBen•5mo ago
Perseverance is the most important thing I think
bdcravens•5mo ago