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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

Eastern europe has software nailed down. Poland, chechoslvovakia, the baltics- they are naturals in this.

Ehm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_Czechoslovakia

As if western europe wouldn't have the skills. Eastern Europe has not relevant international software industry outside of JetBrains. Same as western europe which at least has SAP and Spotify.

CD Project Red

Forgot to subtract the nordics from western europe. My bad.

I very much agree from contractors I’ve worked with from Poland and the like, but the same areas don’t produce a lot of international software companies. Lack of capital for venture businesses in those regions? Hard to pin down.

Why aren't they meaningfully competing with Ireland as centres for software, if that's the case?

Obviously Czechoslovakia has a great excuse, not having existed for 32 years, but neither Czechia nor Slovakia come close to Ireland, either is terms of Euro-value or number of software jobs.

Ireland's software exports dwarf Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined. That's ignoring the inflated GDP figures from international IP revenue tax-dodging.

Ireland is a tax haven that parasitically deprives the rest of the EU of tax revenue. It's not a viable model to emulate and would cause a race to the bottom, at the expense of the public and to the benefit of the modern day robber barons.

> Ireland is a tax haven that parasitically deprives the rest of the EU of tax revenue.

The days of the Double Irish are long gone and comparing effective tax rates paints a very different story, so this is 5 years out of date in as true as it ever was.

Even excluding the EU IP revenue of multinationals with EMEA HQs in Ireland, real software development revenue is over double Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltics combined.

Are you asserting that 5 years of no specific imbalance is long enough to offset decades of software ecosystem building driven by tax cuts?

Not by tax cuts, by tax policy. One which the bloc was happy to enable when it wanted to pass the Lisbon treaty.

But that's irrelevant, as ghost HQs can avail of Ireland's tax regime with minimal employees.

Ireland's extremely educated workforce and exceptionally stable and peaceful governance along with business friendly economic climate are the reason Ireland is a software powerhouse, independent of tax regime (which is not particularly conducive to large employers).

Wasn't Ireland used for tax evasion for a long time ? Wondering if that might be somehow related & how irish some of those companies are in practice.

Also there are quite a few successful gaming companies in central and eastern Europe - like CD project (Witcher/Cyberpunk) in Poland and Factorio, Mafia, Kingdom Come from Czech Republic.

Also on the IT driven services are there are quite big companies like like Alza/Allegro (eq. local Amazon), Seznam (eq. local Google), Windy (weather), etc.

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