alt Hacker News?
This applied to salaries, it wasn't a capital expenditure as "capital expenditure" has traditionally been defined.
This was an operational expense.
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Yes, salaries spent to build a capital asset. Half the cost of a new roof is paying salaries, right? And yet, you still depreciate the whole value of the completed thing, not just the cost of the input materials. If you hire the roofers yourself as employees, you're still supposed to be accounting this way - although obviously there are many ways to fudge it.
The point is that building a piece of software that is going to be in use for several+ years is creating an asset. It just goes against our intuition since this industry is so driven by fast fashion, and the bookkeeping of specific components, their depreciation schedules, early end of life, (etc) seems like needless complexity.
While accurate, capex captures the building of things, like hiring a company (that pays salaries) to build a factory.