2021 and 2025 are different.

I have a friend who is a SSE. Mid 30s. Been fully employed his entire life. No degree. Has been writing production code since 15.

His entire local professional network got nuked and people stopped hiring because of that stupid software engineering R&D amortization budget deception of Section 174. And I assume the double whammy of ai.

He had his resume reviewed, ran it by friends it looked good and solid.

Applied to about 300 roles before realizing it was a non starter and he was getting automated rejections for everything.

He had to automate his application process around a full career CV and Ai.

He would spend all day copying in role descriptions and urls and had cursor spit out custom .MD resumes and then run a pdf generator on them.

It was kinda ok and also kinda like each resume was a hyper specific lie. It definitely hallucinated.

He still hit 3k resumes before getting hired and he still only had like 4 companies give interviews.

And that was only after that stupid tax law was revoked.

One persons past suffering and struggle cannot be so naively extrapolated to anothers current suffering.

I'm trying to understand Section 174 impact especially because your friend's persistence seems like a good litmus test that positive changes are afoot. Also I have a daughter who will be looking for R&D/R&E EE position when she graduates in 2026.

Needing to amortize expenses over 15 years puts a big damper on anything corps may be excited about today but with less than 100% assurance of in the long run? Restoring the pre-2022 regime for domestic expenses only is for the most part supporting domestic workers? So your friend is back in a more familiar job market... maybe college grads too? Thanks.

Did he try any other approaches? If the approach I took gave me a 0.1% interview rate I'd probably do something different.