Please explain then. Because if you spend $2m on an idea, layoff half the company, pivot to a new idea, rehire. You think it's fair on the rest of us you get to write that risk off? This. Is. Why. People. Hate. Tech.
Maybe? What if it was a one time manual test harness? What if it was a migration for a new client that has since quit? There is a pretty wide range of tasks a developer can do.
With a startup you're running a search function. The code you hired the developer to write often does stop working because you've been forced to pivot as you search for product-market fit.
If we spend $1M in year one to build a platform, we will surely spend more than $1M in year two maintaining and extending it, and keep doing that until almost the day we finally abandon it. Depreciation might make sense when the actual investment was heavily front-loaded (compared to the revenue) but in our industry it almost never is.
Pretty much everyone else works on the idea that salaries are operational expenses and not subject to amortization.
I have yet to see any other case of salaries being turned into Capital Expenses (aka something that requires amortization/depreciation). I'd understand if outsourcing (or otherwise contract work) would be treated as something to be amortized, but we're talking SALARIES.
