I've heard this complaint/observation many times and I just don't buy it. For one thing, particularly for large companies, the deduction smooths out. Yes, you can only deduct 20% of the costs this year but you're also deducting 20% from the previous year, 20% from the eyar before that and so on.

Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.

Usually this subject comes up where people (at least on HN) are telling people to mail their Congresspeople and Senators to get a bill passed to "fix" this and my question is always this:

"What tax cuts are you going to give back to pay for this?"

If we want to end this ridiculous IP transfer to Ireland and royalty payments to offshore profits to avoid taxes at the same time, I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.

> Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.

That's just not how big companies look at their budgets, it isn't all one big pool of funds coming in and going out everything has a cost center and is accounted for individually end to end. This tax change made certain jobs suddenly 20% more expensive on paper. People in corporate finance look at these numbers and make recommendations that get implemented.

> the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.

Sure, but that doesn't necessarily change the marginal cost of hiring another dev if the tax incentives have worsened.

The time value of money over 5 years is significant, especially in a fast moving industry like tech. The correlation between this change passing and tech hiring dropping is strong so I'm inclined to think there's some signal there.

> I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.

It's already been fixed for US workers.