Why Ireland is the Perfect Place for Your Tech Career

Whether you’re thinking of making a career move or you just feel like an adventure, being a techie certainly gives you lots of chances to travel. No doubt your LinkedIn inbox is heaving with messages from recruiters trying to lure you someplace else. Sometimes, the best locations are those right in front of your nose. Like Ireland. Yes, your closest neighbour. It’s often overlooked for the bright lights of Silicon Valley, but Ireland is worthy of your consideration – here’s why.

A Thriving Tech Culture

You won’t need to compromise your career, in fact Ireland is the perfect place to grow it. Yes, we’re a small island but when it comes to tech, we punch way above our weight. Ireland is home to the top 10 born on the internet companies and 16 of the top 20 global software companies. We’ve also got 9 of the top 10 US ICT companies, the top 3 Global enterprise software companies and 4 of the top 5 IT service companies. So, you can rest assured that your career is in safe hands here.

Meet New People

Often a big city can make it quite hard to meet people. Ireland’s smaller size makes it that bit easier to quickly find a community of people with similar interests to you. If tech meet-ups are your thing, Dublin doesn’t disappoint. There are hundreds. We sampled a week of tech meet-ups in Dublin and London – Dublin had 7 versus London’s 8. These meet-ups span everything from Python to AWS. The smaller size means you’ll have more chance of rubbing shoulders with key influencers.

Reclaim Your Down Time

Sick of all work and no play? If you love to cycle, surf, hike, work on personal projects, or spend time with your family, you’ll have more time to do it here. No matter where you base yourself, you’ll be close to nature. For example, if you lived right in the centre of Dublin city, you could grab your bike and be on a coast road in around 30 mins. You’ll also have a better work/life balance, on average just 5% of employees in Ireland work very long hours, much less than the OECD average of 13%*.

Ireland is also a safe place to live with 77% of people reporting that they feel safe walking alone at night, which is higher than the OECD average of 68%*. The homicide rate is also far lower at 0.8 versus the OECD average of 4.1*.

(*source: OECD Better Life Index)

Close to Home

Moving to Ireland means you’ll still be close to home – flight time from Dublin to London is about an hour and a half and there are lots of flights daily. If you love to travel, you’re also in easy reach of all the major European cities and you can get from the centre of Dublin city to the airport by car in under 30 minutes.

Have We Caught Your Attention?

Get the ball rolling on your Irish adventure by browsing our latest jobs. You can also check out these real stories of people who moved to Ireland to work in tech.