It's telling that everywhere is compared with SV, not with Scotland or London.
That's due to tax reasons. US companies extracting value from Europe while avoiding taxes at all costs.
Tax was a huge factor in drawing some of the big names but the double-Irish (the worst aspect of tax avoidance) had been phased out. Corporate tax is 12.5% which is lower than the majority of EU countries [1] but the existing ecosystem of companies has also helped create an attractive labour pool. If it's purely tax everyone would move to Hungary (9%).
1: https://taxfoundation.org/2021-corporate-tax-rates-in-europe...
Like he said, there are places with tax rates below Ireland (eg. Hungary, Bulgaria). Taxes are a significant aspect but it's a combination of things.
Is there a handy list of such countries?
(I'm genuinely curious.)
English documentation is customarily recognized throughout the EU.
https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/about-epi/faq/
> What is the methodology behind index?
> The EF EPI calculates a country’s/region's average adult English skill level using data from three different versions of the EF SET. Two versions are open to any Internet user for free. The third is an online placement test used by EF during the enrollment process for English courses.
> In order to calculate a country’s EF EPI score, each test score was normalized to obtain the percentage of correct answers for that test. All the scores for a country/region were then averaged across the three tests, giving equal weight to each test. Regional and global averages were weighted by the populations of each country/region within each region.
People who don't know english in the first place won't have any reason for taking those tests.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
I could be wrong, but a quick search for unicorns in Dublin turned up rather empty...
Intercom, Workhuman and CarTrawler and others are in the pipeline like Pointy and Manna. Plenty of Irish software developers -- they also leave Ireland and found companies in other countries like Stripe.
Geez, the smarminess in this comment - unreal.
2 students who graduated secondary school went to college in usa, lived in usa and started a company called stripe. they were college students who dropped out.
I'm sure they have some Irish connection, but it's obviusly not a Dublin company.
* Intercom - Founded in San Fransisco according to themselves.
* Workhuman - Founded 20+ years ago.
* CarTrawler - Founded 30+ years ago.
Not really signs of a "Silicon Valley"-startup/unicorn kind of atmosphere in my book :)
These type of articles do help with such decisions, making locations more attractive etc. There will be a beauracrat somewhere in all govts pushing these narratives with press. How else do you attract talent in such a competitive world?
May have sounded nuts otherwise, but "as he has young kids"? That would be a reason for moving to Stockholm (or Scandinavia in general), not against.
Maybe I misunderstood - where does this number come from? There are more than 5 million in working age in Sweden.
The contract is from last year, and it is only slightly below the average rent for my area (Neukölln). Even the most-wanted areas still have plenty of openings like this, but they are usually not posted on the open market, you need to have a network of people to recommend you.
There are also a lot of tech companies in Dublin, London, Berlin, Paris...
I don't think any one of those can claim the title of "Silicon Valley of Europe" as in "the place to be for tech companies".
I'd say most of the US Big Tech have their European HQ in Dublin. And most European startups/tech companies have their HQ in London. That might change with brexit but so far it's what I've seen.