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Comment by durnygbur | Hacker News Reader

Dublin is a mere presence used to funnel out due taxes and contributions. Some real tech stuff might be happening in London though.

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I'm a US expat living in Dublin so I have some "on the ground" views. There are some rather significant software dev operations here, but most are offices of large multinationals (Google, Microsoft, Hubspot, Activision, TikTok is building a massive office currently, etc). There is a massive drop off in salary and interesting work when you look for more "local" (Irish or even European headquartered companies). I get linkedin messages from Irish companies talking about paying 70k euro for senior software positions when the going rate is more realistically at like 120k.

My view is that if Ireland hadn't done their tax shenanigans then none of these companies would be here and it would be an absolute backwater (software dev-wise). Ireland has some really great education and talent but the culture, infrastructure, and personal taxes don't lend themselves to a bootstrap/startup friendly environment imo. So even today a ton of Irish people move to the UK, Canada, or Australia for better jobs.

Looking at the available jobs in Dublin for e.g. Google, I don't think that's wholly accurate. Ireland's tax story does attract US multinationals, but they're not just shell companies.

At least until a few years ago, large corporations had their support centers in Ireland (Dublin), but the focus may have shifted in time.

The specific engineering positions[¹] seem to have a significant rate of customer support/sales/market; it seems that Ireland isn't a technical research center. I haven't looked at how the mix of open positions is in SV/USA, though.

¹=https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?category=DATA_CENTE...

True, but they move peripheral services there (e.g support) but not the more lucrative positions.

FB and Google have enormous buildings in central Dublin. AWS runs a very large facilities and developer group. Apple has a headcount of about 4000 people in Cork in a facility that's been there for nearly 40 years.

They're here because of tax, yes, and Ireland is in no meaningful way a leading startup centre. But Dublin in particular has more people working in software than (say) London.

Dublin doesn't have more people working in software than London. It isn't even close.

I have seen estimates which suggest the total tech industry employment in Ireland, not Dublin the whole country, is something like 100k. London had this many open vacancies in tech per week earlier this year. And that is assuming all these jobs are equal which, of course, they are not (you are unlikely to open a support centre in London).

London's VC market alone is multiples of the next largest city in Europe (which I believe is Paris). I think Manchester is actually a larger VC market than Dublin (and Edinburgh is probably coming close).

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/people/developers-programmer...

According to this, 9% of the population in Dublin are software developers. By comparison, London seems to be at 7.7% according to the same metric.

Dublin is a small city - I was surprised myself for the first time when I was there I expected it to big european capital. In fact population of Dublin is ~500k and they even market it as "Dublin Town". From the city center most of places are available within 5km radius.

And to clarify, the size of Dublin is relevant because even if smaller cities have a relatively lower mean proportion of software developers, the law of small (!) numbers tells us the variance in the proportion of software developers will be larger, meaning some smaller cities will have the lowest fraction of software developers, and others (perhaps like Dublin) will have the greatest fraction -- just by chance, not due to underlying causal mechanisms.

Ireland is small! Much smaller than I thought, I was shocked when I learned that Ireland has half the population of Sweden.

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