From experience I think your 10% feels overly pessimistic. 30-40% feels more accurate, just like only about the same % that can survive an open plan or cubicle floor.

I see lots of people thriving in remote. Main reasons being a huge increase in quality of life. Regaining 2-3 hours of senseless commuting time per day, getting small household chores done over lunch, not having to schedule repair and maintainance appointments in the weekends etc. is huge.

Now I do agree it is not for everyone. I see especially younger people living alone not coping to well. Part of the reason is they (ab)used the office as a socializing place, and are not used to organizing a personal social life outside work. There's also people that don't actually have much work outside of attending office meetings, and nobody thrives sitting in Teams calls all day.

Then there's also real downsides. Some people living in shoebox appartments in the city just do not have the space. W While work can be done (more?) efficiently remote, but carreer climbing needs in person contact. It's like dating. Real dinner or a video call? No comparison.

Best of both worlds would be 0 commute time to a luxurious private office inside the company premises. All the rest will be tradeoffs and compromises either way.

A lot of companies just suck at it too. "Here's Slack, figure it out" seems to be a common approach. In person you can pester the person next to you when you're new, overhear conversations, etc. but remote it is MUCH harder to ascertain the culture, Slack etiquette, etc (my favourite was "people write in Slack all the time, in public, even to themselves, it's your job to mute Slack when you need focus, and don't use DM's unless you really need the privacy"), but I have only seen this done very well in one place - Auth0 (pour one out :-( ) . Maybe because it started remote with founders thousands of KM apart.

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.

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.

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 is pulling together and short of making the remote teams spin offs there’s no way to disentangle dependencies. And at some level even if you could management has to work cross regionally which isolates them from their center of power in the home office time zone. The root is the company is asking you to make immense personal sacrifice so they can save money if the model were to work. There is no upside to anyone other than the remote management in this situation so they burn out quickly and still fail because literally no one else in the company cares in any meaningful way. It’s unfair at its core and therefore fails.

The issues of quality and whatnot are at their core racist IMO but are made real because of the timezone issue. The norms and culture expected in the home time zones don’t translate easily and result in an impedance mismatch and a different measure of “good.” Because the remote team is isolated and unempowered they always struggle to adopt the standard of the team and to some extent can’t ever succeed in the quality space as it’ll be an ever shifting goalpost whose reasoning is effectively hidden. Then layer in the latent resentment on both sides and the whole situation is bound to fail, but the home teams have the advantage of being resident with the only management that matters.

I wish everyone involved would realize the experiment has failed. But CFOs are too powerful in most companies large enough to reasonably pull off outsourcing at all and the need for the CEO to please boards and investors who just operating off the financial statements and HBR white papers are too disconnected for why these efforts fail.

Unfortunately the current persecution of immigrants in the US will drive these arrangements more and more. Rather than on shoring local foreign talent with the collocated team, foreign talent will opt to avoid the fear society being birthed. This will lead to a strong incentive to follow talent to their home country leading to more imbalance in talent disoriented time zones. Maybe this would require everyone to figure out the above issues but I seriously doubt it. I think it’ll just make everyone less effective and not achieve anything positive for anyone.

100%. Most of the planet is cheaper than the US, and has been for decades. That being the case, how are there so many knowledge workers here still?

Yup, lots of Y2K work shipped offshore in the 90s while onshore worked on the web boom. After Jan 1, 2000, mgmt thought, hey, how can I use these cheap guys elsewhere.

I think there is game theory at play. I don't think Google for example is leaving money on the table. They hire worldwide of course but they are not swapping US for cheaper countries on mass and it must be for a good reason. Maybe it's a missed opportunity and some YC company dominates the new arbitrage. Who knows! I think I like the soil analogy. Moving the palm tree to another spot is risky if it's doing well in its current soil.

It's not the heady days of 2022 but six figures shouldn't be impossible for someone with 10+ years of experience. But the trick is to (mostly) ignore the European companies and go for the American ones operating in Europe. Switzerland, Norway, and Ireland can be decent too.

I'm still stunned when I see what devs are paid in Germany and southern Europe though.

Six figures isn't special in the US for skilled tech workers. My starting salary as a college grad 25 years ago was an unremarkable $55K when dotcoms were slinging six figure salaries and options. That is now $102K.

If I'm understanding this correctly then this is about a tax disincentive, making it more expensive for US companies to poach R&D talent from other countries.

Not all countries will see that as a problem.

Top engineers move to best pay location. For example best engineers in europe etc. move to US or get similarly high salaries in Europe. And having more high talent people in a location creates a different culture.

There is ofc some difference but if you are taking averages you will have much better engineers in a company based in nyc vs berlin.

I’m not an expert but this has been very apparent in places I worked, US based companies just had a better work setup and everything moved faster and with higher quality.

As an example, just saying an engineer is quarter the price in Turkey so you can just outsource there is very foolish. It just doesn’t work that way, maybe in wet dreams of CEOs only.

Similar thing with LLMs, some people are salivating over how they won’t need developers but it just isn’t that way yet.

Seeing how hungry businesses are for outsourcing and hiring remote, and seeing how it isn’t really working that way should be concrete proof for this.

In the last 10 years, have there been more than a handful of bills that got 60 votes in the senate?

I wouldn't like what the current congress would do without the filibuster, but at this point a paralyzed system might be worse.

The last time something like that happened was probably the Patriot Act.

This was called pork when it used to happen and people were very angry about it.

Or set a little timing booby trap. Like in this, "We're going to cut Medicaid, but only after the midterms, so if you start screaming about it, we'll blame the Dems for it."

While accurate, capex captures the building of things, like hiring a company (that pays salaries) to build a factory.

Yes, salaries spent to build a capital asset. Half the cost of a new roof is paying salaries, right? And yet, you still depreciate the whole value of the completed thing, not just the cost of the input materials. If you hire the roofers yourself as employees, you're still supposed to be accounting this way - although obviously there are many ways to fudge it.

The point is that building a piece of software that is going to be in use for several+ years is creating an asset. It just goes against our intuition since this industry is so driven by fast fashion, and the bookkeeping of specific components, their depreciation schedules, early end of life, (etc) seems like needless complexity.

Sure, a lot of that understanding was included in my recognition of the downsides.

The fundamental dynamic is that the government wants there to be a forcing function on having to actually realize profits, so that taxes have to be paid in a timely fashion. They don't want people to be able to reinvest all of the effective profit and keep kicking the can into the future indefinitely. Capital gains and retirement plans are exceptions, each for their own reasons.

ive been coding 5+ hours a day almost every day for 15 years. i think ai will replace 70% of SWE in the near future. not employement, but 70% of the current work done by engineers

Hard disagree, I’ve been agentic coding the past couple of months and have written maybe 100 lines doing this for a living.

The rest is coming up with SDDs and reviewing AI’s code.

I can easily see most devs, doctors and lawyers automated away in the next couple of years.

IDK, sounds like it's a bunch of stupid misc. fees. So instead of just raising the minimum wage for H1Bs and indexing it to inflation, they raise taxes (and these taxes on H1Bs don't seem like a consequential funding source. They might even bring in less tax revenue than raising the H1B minimum wage to where it should be if it had originally been indexed to inflation.)

I don't see anything supporting this in the text of OBBB, nor in the definition of domestic research expense (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/research_credit_basic_sec41...). Where did you see this?

Edit: Oh you mean costs in general, not in the context of section 147

Meh.

If you hire H-1B you should be required to pay a fee greater than it costs to educate an equivalent American. Otherwise you're always in the situation where you have to hire foreigners because no Americans are trained. (or in reality you hire foreigners because they're cheaper for the same role which this no longer makes it the case)

Source?

Tax deductible is a weird way of phrasing it. It's not like these software companies were counting their money at the end of the quarter, and then deciding to do R&D instead of paying taxes. They had already paid R&D expenses to build the product, which gained them revenue. Previously they weren't allowed to actualize the cost of R&D all at once, so the business could be losing money, and still have to pay taxes on top of the loss (which is nuts).

This fixes the problem, so now if you spend $100 on software developers, and you make $100 from the software, then you have $0 income, instead of $80 income.

It’s more about whether or not the company has taxable profits for that year (importantly these are not the same as real profits). I would read this article to understand more about how being forced to amortize tax deductions for expenses affects a business’s taxes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

more info here too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145

Either scenario taxes are paid - it’s just how and over what time period.

It's hackernews, not Elon Musk's X or the French parliament, please bring sources and precise details.

I don’t think this is uniquely Canadian. And it’s usually semi-rational, if you really hate dealing with switching. Most cheaper subscription providers will give you a good deal at first, then jack up the prices when they’re bought by a major provider. New cheaper providers are founded, and the cycle continues. The cheaper prices last for two or three years, or similarly short. Most people would rather take the loss than having to pay attention to this stuff.

The cultural bit is underrated. Tobias Lütke from Germany is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify has written about this issue of Canadian business culture extensively. Also, the ecosystem of VCs in the US are unmatched globally. And, the internal market in US is f'ing huge.

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.

I got more inbound recruiter email in the last week than in the two years up until last week.

Everyone's BATNA just skyrocketed. What you choose to do with a huge surge in your pricing power is up to you, but you have it.

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.

There's no guarantee that posts related to tech that are also related to political stuff will avoid being flagged.

Even when there is a relationship with tech political posts are generally removed if they don't align with a zeitgeist of modern America that seems to chose to fall in line instead of resisting unseemly actions by the new government.

decent point

two counteracting forces:

The senate parliamentarian decided they could be in the reconciliation bill

and outside of the reconciliation bill, believe it or not, Congress does pass other bills over the 60 senate vote threshold

This R&D one would be a decent candidate

Data centers are a pretty good match for nuclear because they run 24/7 and use a fairly constant amount of power. Solar is cheap in terms of amortized price per kWh but then you need some other solution to supply power at night or when it's cloudy, and the price of that has to be paid on top of the cost of solar.

Meanwhile nuclear costs what it does in significant part because the number of new plants is low which requires the cost of designing new reactors etc. to be amortized over fewer plants. But if you build more of them that changes.

It has been historically, but must it be?

By all means, have government get out of the way so the economy can get on with it.

I'm more in favour of tax incentivised encouragement, lowering the barriers to entry, and more so when there are proven benefits to the economy and society, and less in favour of government backed loans and direct cash injection.

Did you know if you run a business (carry on an enterprise) the majority of the costs of doing business are tax deductible.

That's another term subsidised.

I'd argue fossil fuel industry subsidies are a net benefit to society as they help enable cheap reliable energy.

Whereas renewable subsidies are a net negative because they don't. Everywhere more renewables have gone electricity has become more expensive and less reliable, completely antithetical to strong industrial development.

Also, renewables seem to be driven forward largely due to a psychological contagion that a climate apocalypse is nigh, which is turning out to be completely toxic, especially to the minds of the next generations.

You cant automate the tactical assessment of "do we want to incur this tax?" Not easily anyway

At the company I was speaking of, the business approval step involved many internal (and sometimes external meetings) and preparation of a feature and OKR document.

While this was the obvious way of doing things there, without this project step I also don’t think it’d have been regarded as a valid classification step for tax purposes.

I am Austrian. My entire education was dedicated to the rise of fascism and how it could happen and how to make sure it never happens again.

I know what I'm seeing.

Don't believe me? What about subject matter experts that decided to flee the country? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/yale-canada-fasci...

Or how about an excerpt from a book written based on post-WW2 interviews of Germans? Does any of that sound familiar at all? https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm

> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

[...]

> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

> Probably because you've seen it repeated so much in your hyper-propaganda bubble of reddit that you've started to believe it

I've seen it with my own eyes, no fucking thanks.

[dead]