931–940 of 957 posts
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Right, many software jobs are more like being a janitor or repairman. Or even more of a personal assistant or retail worker who is providing ephemeral service to another participant in the whole organization.
Though put that way, it seems hard to rationalize high salaries for software roles where this tax deduction would apply. Granted, supply-and-demand, but still.
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I don't understand the reasoning behind this, however. Why depreciate anything over multiple years vs just deducting it in the current year? Does it not all come out to the same amount to the IRS in the end?
The tax code strives to minimize distortions (except insofar as they are deliberately introduced). That is, it seeks to minimize how much the existence of the income tax changes people’s economic conduct. To minimize distortion, the income tax must accurately compute “income”—the actual increase in wealth. Depreciation is part of that. To compute income, the net increase in wealth, you need to subtract costs from rev…
The problem is those of us who deal with code only rarely are actually just building a vehicle. It's an ongoing activity that more resembles maintenance than the outright purchase of an asset.
Look at how much software is going to a subscription model. That only makes sense if there is ongoing improvement to the software.
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I keep seeing an objection in this thread along the lines of "what make software so special that it deserves a tax deduction". Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a company hires someone to say, mine coal or brew beer, the expense of those employees is an expense any company can claim a full tax deduction on. If you're a line chef or wait tables, your salary is tax deductible to the restaurant. So it's not that we are as…
Taxes on income or capital inherently reduce income and capital. Ditto for sale taxes, which reduces transaction volume. This is bad for the economy and ultimately reduce our tax base. About the only thing that doesn't happen is for non-reproducible privileges such as land, intellectual properties, the electromagnetic spectrum, etc.
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I keep seeing an objection in this thread along the lines of "what make software so special that it deserves a tax deduction". Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a company hires someone to say, mine coal or brew beer, the expense of those employees is an expense any company can claim a full tax deduction on. If you're a line chef or wait tables, your salary is tax deductible to the restaurant. So it's not that we are as…
This wasn't my first impression of this, but the more I heard this dicussed the more I'm forming an opinion that there might be some intentional parts of this that while maybe not being good, make sense from a certain narrow perspective. My assumption is, if tax folks in the US were looking Jealously at US companies with large Multinational presence declaring a lot of their profits abroad. They might have noticed tha…
Since we tried to go to a pay-as-you-go model on bills the tax code has turned into an absolute shambles as the congresscritters look at how to tweak things to "produce" (look at the IRA withdrawals--it produced nothing, just moved some money forward one year while creating a trap that many have fallen into) the desired revenue to cover whatever the bill costs without "increasing taxes."
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> Keep good paying jobs in the USA Uh oh! > give them Green Cards instead of precarity Oh, right, yes! :D You had me for a minute.
If we’re being honest, every country should want to preserve high paying jobs for its citizens. Citizens that get paid well have more spending money, which drives domestic economic growth, which creates more jobs…you get the idea. Outsourcing and exploitative visas are a negative feedback loop that shrinks the actual economy vis a vis stagnant or decreasing wages and higher employment precarity. To have a healthy dom…
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Would you please stop posting flamebait comments? You have a history of doing this and we've asked you to stop more than once.
More than happy to provided that HN goes back to not being political. Because you're asking people to support something that will literally take families off of food stamps and remove their healthcare.
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Though put that way, it seems hard to rationalize high salaries for software roles where this tax deduction would apply. Granted, supply-and-demand, but still.
Why? Just because it's mostly maintenance doesn't mean it isn't a high skill job.
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I dont think the math works out in a way such that individual employees are not interchangable. It's based on engineer labor cost as a whole; there is no difference if the 3yr year employee was Jack or Jane. The net result here seems to be a tax-induced penalty to any (software) organization < 5 years old, as compared to a (software) organization with 5 years of employee history.
I don’t fully understand your comment but it seems that we agree that the answer to “does that create incentives to try to keep employees longer-term in order to make them more cost-efficient?” is “no”.