Comment by safety1st

I mean, the link not many people have made is that executives want to replace programmers with AI because of Section 174.

It has effectively become a lot more expensive and difficult to employ a programmer. Once this change went into effect we started to see hundreds of thousands of layoffs.

Then tech executives started aggressively talking up how you could use AI to write code instead of having humans write it.

Now of course reducing headcount and the associated expenses and replacing them with a bot sounds tempting to executives no matter what. But it sounds REALLY tempting when you've been on a hiring freeze since 2022 due to the fact that you can no longer deduct employee salaries in the year you pay them out.

Bear in mind that both Republicans and Democrats say they want to fix this and haven't done so due simply to gridlock and government incompetence.

I think most software businesses are taking a wait and see approach. Don't hire until this thing gets fixed. In the meantime, double down as hard as you can on automating those programmer jobs out of existence, in case the law never gets fixed.

Section 174 is the root cause.