danhanlon

If you work where I think you work (Irish founded company, office is about as central as you can get in Dublin) it's a great example of the type of thing we need more of! I really do think it's the exception unfortunately, even within the other parts of the multinational here.

Admittedly not too familiar with the hardware R&D work going on here, I know Intel is largely manufacturing with a bit of development from things like the purchase of Movidius.

For the software side, what are those R&D departments actually working on? Would you really say it's R&D and product development? From what I can see, both from my own experience and from job posts, most of the engineering jobs are themselves operations related (SRE, infrastructure, customer support). I wasn't saying we don't have engineering roles in Ireland, but what we do have are not prime roles in terms of the companies products and services, and we should be looking to grow beyond facilitating company operations.

Yeah I think you're spot on with everything. I think some change in direction is needed for the long term but it's something we are not really seeing which is concerning.

The well known MNCs seem to be here largely in an operational capacity, the majority of their workforce would be something like trust/risk/support/finance/sales. In terms of "R&D" and "innovation", work that develops the products and services that are sold, I see very little of that happening in Ireland. Yet these companies have huge engineering and product teams in London which are still growing, and the fact they're not placed here is rather telling. For sure we've benefited from the presence of these MNCs so far, but for it to be more sustainable and for the economy to mature further I think we need to be looking to become a country that's attractive beyond being an operational base.

Off topic from main thread, but how do you use those style rules in uBlock? I've tried looking but I can't find anything for rules like that.

This is really good. I've tried time tracking apps before and the UI was usually a pain trying to categorize things, this feels almost intuitive. Do you've the code for this up on github or anything? Would be cool to customise it and dig into something like exporting the data.

The tax section is incredibly misleading. For Ireland, the 12.5% tax rate is corporation tax, not for individuals. The effective income tax rate in Ireland for dev level salaries is 40%+, after a point your marginal tax rate becomes 52%.

Quickly looking into it, all the tax rates look like the corporation tax. The graph is blatantly wrong across the board.