Starbucks boss Howard Schultz drops his Seattle server for tax-free Florida just as a wealth tax bill goes to production. What can devs learn from this?
Starbucks big boss Howard Schultz just pulled a massive git checkout from Seattle to Florida. The exact same day Washington Democrats pushed an income tax bill to production. Those of you trying to hide your freelance gig money in crypto have a lot to learn from this guy's migration strategy.
Here is the TL;DR: Washington state just passed a bill to tax households making over $1M annually. The revenue is supposed to keep the state's public schools, healthcare, and childcare servers running. Literally the same day, Schultz posted a PR-friendly commit message claiming he and his wife are off on a "next adventure" to enjoy the South Florida sunshine.
The absolute audacity is in the release notes. Schultz wrote: "Starbucks today stands on the shoulders of the many Pacific Northwesterners who built the company." So, he thanks the local devs and workers for grinding to build his empire, but when it's time to pay for their kids' schools and hospitals, he drops the database and migrates to a tax-free state. You can't make this up.
r/antiwork obviously didn't let this slide. The thread blew up with over 7K upvotes. The community's root cause analysis was pretty spot on:
Look, this is peak corporate behavior. Whenever their profit margins or personal wallets are threatened, social responsibility gets completely refactored out of the codebase.
For us devs, the lesson is simple: Stop falling for the "we are a family" corporate culture. When times are good, you're "family." When budgets tighten, they will lay you off as fast as Schultz fled Seattle. Keep your skills sharp, update your repo, and treat your job like an API contract. You provide the endpoints (labor), they provide the payload (money). If they stop sending the right payload, you deprecate the API. Simple as that.
Source: Reddit
