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Comment by throwaway122kk | Hacker News Reader

I would have agreed with you up to few years ago, but now Dublin has a vibrant jobs market in tech with salaries that are equal to higher than London with a less crazy (tho still crazy) cost of living.

Like I said the fall of pound has been spectacular in last 4-5 years.

* Engineer Dublin 2015 - €100K ~£70K

* Engineer Dublin 2020 - €125K ~£112K (5K eur increases per year)

* Engineer London 2015 - £70K ~€100K

* Engineer London 2020 - £95K ~€105K (5K gbp increases per year)

Both engineers start at same pay 5 years ago, both of them think they are moving up in the world with reasonable pay increases per year. One of them is being screwed by falling value of pound against just about every major currency due to Brexit and all the uncertainty.

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It's only 'being screwed' (or just an unfortunate decision on your part) if your participation in Euro economy is weighted high enough vs. the local economy.

i.e. the same increase looks better if you live in London than if you work remotely from Dublin. But.. I don't think it's surprising that London salaries aren't optimised for remote workers in Dublin?

(This may well change of course! Will be interesting to see what happens if remote work gets significantly more widespread.)

London is more expensive to live in than Dublin, by raw property prices, but London is much easier to commute in from distances.

Until the pandemic Dublin had become impossible to rent in due to reallocation to AirBnB.

I'm currently still comfortable in Edinburgh, where I get slightly less money than London but a much cheaper house. My current employer is not exposed to much Brexit risk, but Dublin is very high up on my exit strategy choices list.

Yeah, I'm also in Edinburgh. I honestly don't see the London appeal these days. There are a few cheap northern cities with solid tech scenes, little competition and cheap cost of living. Edinburgh's the best one, but I've heard tons of great stuff about Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham. Even accounting for salary (and those have been going up in Edinburgh recently) you're still better off due to cost of living. Plus green space!

What a coincidence. I'm currently in London but have been given permission to relocate to Edinburgh if I wanted (keeping London salary).

It's really tempting. The thought of being a hour or so's drive from wilderness is very appealing. My main concern is being stuck up there if things really go to shit. That and the poorer weather!

One thing I would recommend if you do consider moving to Edinburgh is moving to a place just outside of Edinburgh that is on a rail line. After living the centre of Edinburgh for ~30 years we moved across to a rural location in Fife and it's the best of both worlds - getting into Edinburgh by train is easy and actually quite a pleasant journey (the Forth Bridge!) and you are a good bit closer to the Highlands (where I go most weekends).

Out of curiousity, how long is the commute and how much less would you the cost of living is? 25%?

Roughly the sliding scale is that 250k buys you:

- a garage in London

- a small flat in central Edinburgh

- a medium sized house in Edinburgh outskirts

- a large house in Edinburgh commuter belt

- a mansion if you're prepared to drive more than an hour

- or a small island in the middle of nowhere

My commute is about 50 mins door to door - 10 min drive, 30 on train and 10 minute walk. Mind you even pre-coronavirus I was only going into the office 2 or 3 days a week, working from home the rest of the time. The train trip is actually quite nice as you go along the coast then across the Forth Bridge.

Property is much cheaper in Fife than a comparable property in Edinburgh. We got a nice 5 bedroom house in a rural area with a large garden and fantastic views for about a third less than a 4 bedroom flat in Edinburgh.

Even without driving there's so much green space up here. And the weather isn't that bad. The east coast from Edinburgh to Dundee is in this weird spot in Scotland that gets significantly less rain than most other areas. It's just a bit colder.

Thats the other problem with Brexit, you might not be able to take advantage of remote if you are in UK as EU has fairly strict data protection laws regarding its citizens.

As a EU citizen i would be horrified if any non EU company gets its hands on my personal data.

From our point of view UK is now in same league of "3rd countries" as Russia or India

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