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369 points tareqak | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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phtrivier ◴[] No.44471009[source]
It was floated a few weeks ago they this tax break's disappearance was responsible for mass lay offs in tech.

Other theory were AI and interest rates.

I'm pretty sure next rounds of layoffs will have another "good reason".

Personally, I'm still partial to my pet and hard to document theory of "when headcounts go down, share prices go up - and past a certain size and age, the goal of a massive corporation is not to build things any more, but to pay for retirements through the resale / buybacks of shares"

But, hey, BBB is singed, so everything will be awesome soon, I suppose ?

replies(2): >>44471320 #>>44471696 #
1. empathy_m ◴[] No.44471320[source]
Hey hey, maybe it will help job stability.

Gergely Orosz, whose writing is influential in tech spheres and fun to read, has been a loud proponent of the theory that TCJA's elimination of the immediate expense of R&D research cost was the skeleton key explaining technology sector layoffs.

It seems to me to that many technology-industry trends are driven by vibes:

* People seem to love reading articles in any kind of media source about their company's products and are remarkably credulous of them / influenced by their content. Not just PR generating roundup reports of media coverage, this is also engineers and leaders who follow any coverage of their firms quite closely.

* There really does seem to be a sort of contagion effect with layoffs where, once one firm began doing it, everyone did (layoffs.fyi has a lot of data supporting this kind of hypothesis)

* Among founders and engineering leaders, there does seem to be a common set of ideas - not just the group-chat consensus that helped kill SVB, but just an overall whisper network of facts that everyone knows is true - which guide their choices.

Overall it seems reasonable for software-industry employees to hope a narrative takes hold like "we had to lay off lots of people because their headcount didn't pencil out during the annual FP&A cycle under the new TCJA R&D rules, but now that the new law has restored immediate R&D expensing the formula is going to make the opaque headcount number higher, and jobs will be more stable". The idea might even become true if enough people believe it.

Personally I think the layoffs are better explained by another phenomenon, superpersuasion from AI. (My niche view is that the first superpersuader success story was when the chatbots convinced business leaders to reallocate resources to buying more GPUs and LLM tokens and lower investment in the rest of their lines of business.)