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OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

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Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#261

Post by fnordpiglet »

CalRobert wrote: post #215
fnordpiglet wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been a part of the entire arc of offshored teams since the trend started in the late 90’s early 00’s. I’ve never seen it work. The primary issue is and always has been time zone related. While it doesn’t show to an accountant we do live on a sphere and there are implications to everyone. The solution is always to find some self contained effort for the remote centers but it never works because the entire company…

It seems like more American companies are noticing that Latin America has lots of intelligent, clever people who produce good work, and cost less. I have worked with a lot of Argentinians and really enjoyed it. I'm in Europe now and it definitely is easier to set up calls with my South African colleagues than the American ones.

Yes I’ve done some excellent work with teams in Brazil.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#262

Post by benreesman »

andrepd wrote: post #236
benreesman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. This is a tough one. Its a really bad bill that happens to also be the best thing that could happen in the economic life of most any programmer. This is going to make a lot of people's lives a lot worse and I'm against it even though it's an absurd windfall for me and people like me.

Yeah. Not gonna lie it's a bit obscene watching people in this thread revelling that their absurdly highly paid jobs will become even more highly paid, given what's at stake.

When the hammer fell in late 2022 / early 2023 I was out of work for the first time in 20 years of uninterrupted employment without one day of unemployment. Having just carried my family (financially) through a bereavement that left people effectively unable to work (there are a zillion expenses you don't think about) I was also running on fumes myself, and I very rapidly surmised that I was going bankrupt : I had a cost structure that takes a minimum of a year to change and I had just gotten done telling the Valley where to stick their millions a few years earlier.

So for me this is like, the end of a period where contrarian hackers can be passed on at arbitrary ability in a way that has no lower limit: there is no bottom now and there is no safety net.

But I had about a decade of just never having to care about money at all before that, so maybe there's some karma in it too.

For me this is like, OK I'm definitely not going to get frozen out of work with no place to live anymore, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't sleep easier last night than I have in a while.

But even from that vantage point, I oppose the passage of this bill and will argue to see it overturmed: the people who it hurts are more vulnerable still.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#263

Post by ndiddy »

unmole wrote: post #52
beebmam wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extra $250 fee for visa applications: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/big-beautif... 3.5% remittance fees on sending money out of the US: https://www.globalimmigrationblog.com/2025/06/what-are-the-i... Also (in above source), no ACA subsidies for H-1B visa holders (and others), which likely means employers they will have to pay more for health care if they want to cover their immigrant workers

> 3.5% remittance fees on sending money out of the US: The version of the bill that passed a 1% excise is applicable " only to any remittance transfer for which the sender provides cash, a money order, a cashier’s check, or any other similar physical instrument ".

For comparison, India taxes remittances at 20%.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#264

Post by sidewndr46 »

xlii wrote: post #163
BobbyJo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores the other financial and non-financial costs of offshoring: legal, cultural, temporal... a lot of the time, those close the gap. On paper, offshoring has made sense the entire time, and yet here we are in 2025 and companies still hire American devs. Not only that, they often fly in foreign devs just to pay them more here than if they had just offshored to their home country.

I have approx. 15 years of experience working remotely for various companies all across the globe and was always an advocate of thesis that remote work is difficult and most people aren’t cut for it and (to horror of many proponents) and on average are less efficient than on-site hires. There are many reasons: It’s difficult to understand _intention_ when deprived of non-verbal communication and working in a choppy n…

If management is so poor that they can't communicate intention in writing, then I don't really see how being in office or anywhere for that matter will help. They're just flat out incompetent. I've seen the opposite of this as well, where whatever management clearly communicated is most definitely not what is going to get executed.

If internal politics are blocking knowledge, access, & contribution of any employee the correct action is not to hire them. If they are already hired, the correct action of management is to offer them severance.

My experience working in software startups is that the average retention period of an employee is 2 years, in any work environment. What you're calling the honeymoon period is effectively just the average retention of the industry anyways.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#265

Post by 9283409232 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #182
9283409232 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is to vote out politicians. Getting ranked choice voting on your states ballot would go a long way to fixing this. They would not have Mamdani on the ballot for NY mayor if it wasn't for ranked choice voting. Certain politicans know this and have made RCV illegal in their state. Get RCV on the ballot for your state.

Score voting (or STAR) is better.

Anything is better than what we have and ranked choice voting is the most popular alternative.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#266

Post by LexiMax »

Thorrez wrote: post #171
LexiMax wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm familiar with the voting patterns of HN users. For this reason I tend to browse HN using the https://news.ycombinator.com/active frontpage because it contains the flagged topics that certain users of this site attempt to hide, while also preserving the vast majority of interesting tech-related topics.

It's not about voting patterns. It's about the rules of HN: >On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.…

I am also aware of what the rules say, as well as how they tend to be applied in practice.

The latter is why I don't find arguments that fall back on the former persuasive.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#267

Post by UltraSane »

xlii wrote: post #163
BobbyJo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores the other financial and non-financial costs of offshoring: legal, cultural, temporal... a lot of the time, those close the gap. On paper, offshoring has made sense the entire time, and yet here we are in 2025 and companies still hire American devs. Not only that, they often fly in foreign devs just to pay them more here than if they had just offshored to their home country.

I have approx. 15 years of experience working remotely for various companies all across the globe and was always an advocate of thesis that remote work is difficult and most people aren’t cut for it and (to horror of many proponents) and on average are less efficient than on-site hires. There are many reasons: It’s difficult to understand _intention_ when deprived of non-verbal communication and working in a choppy n…

When I have had 100% remote work jobs one think I have noticed that when I get into the "zone" and am being very productive having to go home doesn't interrupt it and I can keep being very productive for many more hours. Then I can slack off the next day if I want to.

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#268

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

jimmydorry wrote: post #107
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #91

The elimination of green energy incentives is going to have a big negative effect on the economy. Those billions of dollars not only were going to new businesses and jobs, but they were joined with loans from banks and commitments from customers with the expectation that the government would be funding the remainder. This means private industry and banks will be shouldering the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars…

The largest competitor to US renewables, would be China. They have been rolling back their subsidies for years. [1] China, India, Russia, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia (off the top of my head, and a quick google to add a few I missed [2]) have all increased investments into coal since 2020. The renewable industry in the US was wrought with companies seizing as many renewable credits and subsidies as they…

> We have long been told that renewables are cheaper in every way that matters, so let's see the economics of that play out.

Renewables are cheaper now than they used to be. Why? The same reason anything is cheaper the longer you make it: technological improvement, economies of scale, production efficiency, increased # customers, reduced capex, amortized r&d, etc.

"the economics of that" aren't black and white. Just because something is expensive today doesn't mean it will be expensive tomorrow. But if something cheaper exists today, and nobody invests in the expensive thing (because "the market" doesn't see immediate cash gains in it), then the expensive thing never has the opportunity to become cheap.

> The renewable industry in the US was wrought with companies seizing as many renewable credits and subsidies as they can, while providing as little as possible to show for them.

The "show" is long-term. That's the whole point of all green energy: it's expensive at the beginning, and then becomes increasingly cheaper over time, to the point you start saving money, and then you keep saving money. But to ever get to that point, you have to invest big at the start. That's what the subsidies are for!

China has a massive and cheap labor force and decades of manufacturing expertise. That makes their products/services cheap and advanced. Unless we literally take over Mexico, we don't have the labor. And unless we start investing now, we'll never have the expertise. Without subsidies, we will never get on renewables, and we will always pay more for energy. Since the whole future of the world is dependent on energy, it might be a good idea for us to invest in it!

Re: OBBB signed: Reinstates immediate expensing for U.S.-based R&D

#269

Post by Galanwe »

eric-burel wrote: post #259
forty wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite common knowledge :) if you want journalist material, I think there was a Cash Investigation on the topic a few years ago. I have discussed this topic with many other engineers (known from engineering school, from working 13+ years in the Paris tech startup ecosystem and from my worker union, whose scope include most tech companies) and I have never heard any of them saying they did not write bullshit CIR r…

My experience is different, so far I've defended R&D that I believed to be eligible to tax credits, in order for companies to be competitive with other countries that also subsidize R&D and innovation, namely USA and Canada. You can't generalize a 7 billion tax cut system based on one journalist work (the same and the same is quoted again...), opinions based on a few rotten fruits in the basket, and an anti-startup t…

My experience, from 20 years as well, aligns with widespread abuses. Pretty much the whole financial sector is sponsored by the CIR, none of which contribute anything beyond the bullshit reports mentioned above. I myself wrote countless reports like that, most of them vastly autogenerated to look pompous.

I don't remember having to defend anything to get the CIR, it's more of a judgment call on whether you feel confident to defend it if you get an audit, and these are very rare. We've had such audit in the past, and it made everyone rewrite each submitted report in a hurry to make them look more serious. No sanction were applied.

At this point, my opinion is that the CIR has very little to do with actual research, but rather it's a discretionary tax subsidy for sectors in which France wants to be competitive.

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