> That's trying to put a material value on software, and doing it based on the salaries of developers is as crazy as valuing it in lines of code.
We all do this at the conclusion of every successful job interview. And performance review. And budget review. IMO it's a reasonable floor on the value engineers produce: if you produced an asset worth less than your salary you should be concerned for your career.
> On what time scale? In a year, sure. But there are certainly days (weeks?) where the actual value produced by any one engineer is zero, or negative.
Well, that's what I had in mind, but the concept is why agile focuses on shipping early and often. Well, mostly it's to get in more feedback iterations, but engineer hours are not immune to time-value of money analysis.
> This is a categorically stupid thing to assert. It's a stupid thing to say and it's a stupid thing to believe. Payroll is an immediate cost, paying for the development of software is not remotely the same thing as purchasing a capital asset
But it's also not like paying a janitor to clean toilets and empty wastebins where we know there's no residual value accruing to the employer. Companies do buy and sell intellectual property in the form of copyrighted code, and in the form of patents. Heck, ARM basically makes a living licensing out the cores it designs.
This obviously isn't perfect and the disparate impact has unintended consequences that could make things worse overall, but the accusations against the senate are a non-sequitor given the power of the purse lies in the House.
Why is software special? Why is all other payroll not treated like this?
In reality, this is something made up to balance a budget while pushing the consequences beyond the next election. It isn't a well intentioned accounting principle
It’s not just software. Software developers are just the most vocal people talking about it. I worked a company that owned nuclear power plants. We did R&D on how to make the power plants work more efficiently and safely. Some of the work we did qualified as R&D and could be capitalized. This mattered as the US government gave tax credits for eligible R&D. The tax credits directly reduced your tax bill.
On what time scale? In a year, sure. But there are certainly days (weeks?) where the actual value produced by any one engineer is zero, or negative.
This whole discussion is sort of orthogonal to the real point, though. The state (or the IRS, or Congress, or whatever) has decided that for some reason, if Jim gets paid $100k his boss can deduct $100k in expenses, but if Jane gets paid $100k her boss can only deduct $20k, because she's typing different things into a different box the computer.
This is a categorically stupid thing to assert. It's a stupid thing to say and it's a stupid thing to believe. Payroll is an immediate cost, paying for the development of software is not remotely the same thing as purchasing a capital asset, and this is exactly what we get when we keep electing nonagenarian plutocrats to office year after year, decade after decade, who think the internet is a series of tubes.