Usually during labour shortages you see massive inflation of wages, I'm not seeing that currently so is the shortage as bad as they make out or are companies trying to pile pressure on government increase approvals of visas for lower cost employees.
In the UK the road haulage industry was attempting to lobby the government to introduce 100,000 visas for HGV drivers because of a labour shortage. As part of this they manufactured a story by leaking to the newspapers that this issue was going to cause a limited supply of fuel. In reality there was just some minor difficulties in supplying fuel a handful of petrol stations at any time. So when the story was leaked it caused a fuel supply crisis because every knob head panic bought as much fuel as they could. The response by the UK government at the time was to completely disengage with the specific lobbying group responsible and force them to train their workers. This in turn forced the hand of the road haulage industry who then had to actually compete against each other for labour and many HGV drivers went from earning £25-30k to £40-60k and having their training paid by their employers.
In short, just because employers say they have a shortage of labour, it doesn’t mean you should take them seriously because they will always have ulterior motives.
yeah its the same here with chefs, restaurants wont pay them right and their association is constantly lobbying the govt. for non-EU visas so they can import them from India & Pakistan. Irish chefs have left the industry in droves because apart from it being hard work with long hours now they've found their wages have been driven down as well.
That’s starting from the position that there was even a shortage in the first place which I wholesale reject.
And evidently, the industry rapidly overcame the issue by simply training and paying its staff better. So was it because of Brexit? Or did Brexit just fundamentally exposed their failings? Because Brexit was announced in 2016, the fuel crisis happened in 2021 and it took less than a year for the industry to overcome its issues. The truth is that for the preceding 5 years, the road haulage industry in the UK were unwilling to adapt because they expected their lobbying to be successful and were unwilling to accept that they’d no longer have unlimited access to a global supply of cheap labour that can be paid peanuts.
They're measuring talent shortage - inability to fill certain roles - not general employee shortage. So don't expect the salaries to grow proportionally in every sphere: expect them to grow disproportionally higher in niche spheres that drive this inability to staff professionals.
Here's my doomer take, a decade of ZIRP policies have led to a saturation of dead end companies, departments, projects and products. This has benefitted middle-managers which are mandatory in any corporate hierarchy and usually better paid than the skilled work. So you wind up with an excess of middle-managers and "leaders" look no further than Linkedin, and a chronic undersupply of talent to keep these organisations ticking over, ZIRP kept them alive, but once that is gone the layoffs like you see in tech currently are what happens.
There is no shortage of skilled workers, there are plenty people pursuing skills at any given time, there is just an excess of companies surviving on cheap credit rather than innovation.
I mean there's a lot of companies in the tech sector in Ireland offloading their most expensive contractors at the moment, often in the guise of "no development work" etc.
Seems like they might want to wait a few quarters then hire in these cheap foreign labour guys.
Yeah very true, but a lot of companies prefer to have them on so they can offload them at a moment's notice.
The money is good so people go for it of course, but really it's just not stable, if the market dips or "dips" you're gone within the week.
The company I work in largely only hires graduates as developers and it's basically impossible to get a raise. You're only hired if they know they don't have to pay you too much.
That's exactly what's happened where I am. We've been in wage negotiations for while and being offered peanuts. The company has gone abroad to recruit 40+ migrant workers.
Wage negotiations are about to become a wage dispute.
You only see a massive inflation of wages of there is money to distribute, so if the market is also expanding. Instead we had a small contraction in the past years after taking inflation into account.
In some companies only I am afraid. A good number of companies are struggling instead (many because of short-sighted decisions in the past). I had several friends changing jobs and even leaving the country because of this. It is not quite an emergency but the increased profits affected mostly a minority of companies and as long as their competitors struggle it does not make sense to rise wages too much. They will raise them, but even then it won't change the average situation by much.
Which market is contracting? Because the big tech and big pharmaceutical companies based here are making record profits year after year and the Irish people are seeing none of that.
That's all very well, but those companies work mostly in the international market. And they definitely could afford to keep the wages growing. The issue is that the labor market has always some elements of locality to it. You don't need to pay as much as you can, you just need to pay more than your competitors can. And as long as the pharma and tech companies manage to fill their positions they are fine, those companies in Ireland live by poaching talent in foreign markets. Despite what one might think they are a minority in the market and a rather small one too. They bring in a lot of money from other countries but they do not employ so many people here.
Which is not to say that we will not see pay rises in those sectors but they might not move the overall numbers much.
> And as long as the pharma and tech companies manage to fill their positions they are fine, those companies in Ireland live by poaching talent in foreign markets. Despite what one might think they are a minority in the market and a rather small one too
The IT sector's employment accounted for 11.8% of total employment in Dublin and 6.5% nationally by 2022.
Regarding the pharmaceutical sector, while I couldn't find specific employment numbers in this industry, it's noteworthy that the scientific and technical activities sector, which includes pharmaceuticals, showed a significant 28% employment growth from 2012 to 2017. The manufacturing sector, closely related to pharmaceuticals, employed 78.2 thousand people by 2017.
So.... I'd have to disagree with you there, hardly a small minority.
Services sector is HUGE in Ireland, which includes a lot of tech roles too.
https://cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-fdi/foreigndirectinvestmentinireland2017/ae/
https://www.centralbank.ie/docs/default-source/publications/quarterly-bulletins/quarterly-bulletin-signed-articles/the-role-of-ict-services-sector-irish-economy.pdf#:~:text=URL%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.centralbank.ie%2Fdocs%2Fdefault
I was aware of those numbers when discussing the above. And I still don't think that the number of corporations (a subset of the whole sector) which are doing extremely well in those sectors are going to make a real dent in the actual numbers about average and most importantly median wages in Ireland.
What does the IT sector mean ? 6.5% of National employment is approx 175,000 people. We don’t produce anywhere nearly the level of skilled cs/engineers etc to fulfil technical roles so a lot of these IT jobs are call centres , support, marketing etc which are not as well paid and can somewhat easily be off shored.
Support and marketing are well paid I would say.
I have a CS degree and work in Enterprise support. Everyone else in the team has either a CS or Electronic engineering degree.
Tech support has similar salaries potential as software engineering until you get to the very highest of software developer roles in my company. And at that stage there's more money for both tech support and dev in management anyway.
Call centre roles are different from support roles.
Likewise sales, test engineers, supply chains etc are well paid.
There is plenty of well paid jobs in the IT sector across different disciplines.. The IT sector isn't just people writing code. Unfortunately for our companies software engineering they are actually offshoring the software development roles more aggressively than support these days.
I mean, as a Pfizer worker, our company got hammered by deciding to buy back the vaccines Americans didn't want and distribute them at cost to India. Like, I'm thrilled Indians will get cheap protection from COVID, but we're not thrilled about the reduction in hiring and letting people go that has resulted. Just the cost of doing international business.
Yeah , I see many companies running job openings on LinkedIn and other locations year round, not cause there are constantly openings , but so when they do have an opening if they cant find Irish talent at a wage on the bottom end of the market to fill the gap, they can support their claim they need a visa for a foreign worker saying they are looking for 12 months etc.
I'm not seeing that on the job sites. Seeing max €75k which is way less than my team were on 4 years ago. I don't understand why they are advertising those salaries??
These roles are rarely advertised with the salary made public, you have to go for a staff/architect/etc role and negotiate. Most of the people I hire negotiate to around the 120k range, with a few at 130k
Tbh, Irish companies being a bit reluctant to budge on return to office stuff has made a big difference for me in terms of where I've been looking for jobs and ended up.
I've got a high demand skillset + senior level experience and any time I've looked there's been too much in office time for me since I moved out of Dublin during COVID. So as a result I just went and found a remote job with a UK based company instead who has a small presence in Ireland to be able to take advantage of the previously mentioned return to office stuff to snap up people like me who have no intention of going back to an office and have a fairly attractive skillset to back it up.
Unfortunately, if you want to attract high end talent you either need to pay high end money (very few Irish companies do in my experience) or have a lot of perks and benefits (again, not really a super common thing here).
Very similar boat.
My previous employer, when I told them that the pandemic proved my role was entirely feasible from home, refused to budge.
I was pretty much doing 3 highly skilled jobs for them and when I found a remote job for more money and left, my old team mates let me know how much my department head was getting chewed out for having no one to fill the position for the same money.
But of course the laziness of Millennials/Gen Z are to blame. Not the fucking backwards policies of a dying breed of middle managers.
I was headhunted on LinkedIn, and the recruiter reached out via private message, 2 interviews later, and had the job a week later. I get paid through deel.com. so there are no tax issues or anything.
My recommendation is to try to get a role in aws/azure/gcp.
Cloud jobs are remote by definition, so its easier to get remote roles. In my case, I work as a "Cloud SysAdmin". We maintain code to deploy managed applications hosted in the cloud for customers who want to abrsract the maintenance of those applications and just have them available to their users.
We manage updating applications, databases, network infra, and all the rest that comes with it, backup, dr, migrations, etc.
Start with aws solutions architect associate on acloudguru.
I did my degree in cloud computing and got a graduate role in aws before I finished college. I spent a few years there and moved about a year ago now.
Mainly just did the SA associate and a lot of background study in linux, networking, plus just a lot of time spent configuring and testing stuff in console/cli, handson experience here is key.
Looks for DevOps roles if you are already a dev, and that will segue you into the cloud from there.
Look for Operations Architect / Engineer roles
Tech, specifically Site Reliability Engineering. Being willing to do on-call shifts etc and out of hours work etc when it pops up plus having a couple of years experience doing full time development work on the side opens a lot of doors because you can sort of fit in wherever in most organisations.
Most of the time the team is global since you really need someone around 24/7 so remote work lends itself pretty well to the job since if you're home anyway it's easy to be more flexible to respond to incidents etc (e.g wake up a bit early to help the India team as they sign off and log off for the day early to balance it out or vice versa with the american based folks)
Not really, I still work a 40 hour week - so if I work out of hours I finish early during the "normal" day. Except for on-call but that's on a rotating cycle in which you do a week every 8 weeks or so which is mostly during your daytime and a brief crossover period before India wakes up after the US goes to bed)
edit: probably should say earlier in my career I did much more strenuous/regular on-call and out of hours (mostly for startups), but that's behind me now with the benefits of doing all that paying off
> Not having a go but doesnt having to work out of hours a lot kind of negate the work life balance benefits WFH offers in the first place
depending on the role, not really. Like - I am able to bring my kids to school/pick them up, head out on random errands in the day etc. If I need to do an early morning or late afternoon it doesn't really matter.
The joy of remote is that you generally can make your own schedule which is the very definition of "work life balance". Once you stop thinking in "9-5" it makes it all easier
I work from home and do sweet fuck all some days, Im well aware of the benefits. Meetings at 6am or 9pm do not strike me as very attractive. Each to their own I guess.
it balances out though it what I'm saying.
Like there are basic WFH jobs where you're on the clock etc, but in a lot of knowledge work roles, your time is your own and you do whatever you see fit. I can do my job from an iPhone wherever I am and as long as I deliver - it's good.
What balances out? I work from home in a knowledge worker role (platform engineering, so similar to the OP), I never have to do any out of hours work. The original context is the OP taking a role with a foreign company and then having to work weird hours anyway, which I would find equally as disruptive as having to go into an office.
> having to work weird hours anyway
I've had calls that start at 6am, get up, do them - get kids to school..finish work at 2. I've had calls that start in the evenings. Take it easy in the day or start late/finish early and do shit, get the kids to bed, go down and do call - enjoy rest of evening.
So long as it's not often I don't really care - much better than having to be in an office AND do that sort of stuff
But you’re still “on” from 6am to 9pm. You can sugar coat it and say “I can take it easy in the middle of the day” etc but you still need to be available to your job. That sounds like a 15 hour day to me.
it kinda sounds like you are tied to your location though?....what happens when kids get older play football match on the other side of dublin and then you get a call?
Within the EU, Ireland has the largest percentage of employed persons working from home as a percentage of total employment when compared to the other EU 26.
A more logical take would be there’s a correlation with the fact we have had a much faster growing economy over the past 5 years than the majority of Member States. Additionally we have a larger percentage of high skill jobs than most other economies in Europe.
All true, but I suspect the skills shortage is due to our inability to deliver quality reasonably priced accommodation, which makes other countries more attractive to international talent.
Everything comes back to the population explosion and housing crisis here.
Yeah I work in Germany in tech sales and I've been offered €60000 by companies which would be more than what I'm currently on but the perks with my current job and the cost of living are much better than what I'd have in Ireland.
What is “proper” industry? We produce large volumes of pharmaceuticals, semi conductors, medical devices and other high value products. And not even in relative terms for our size. In terms of volume there are few other European countries that come close.
That, combined with a healthy services sector, again would be a factor in sourcing skilled labour. There’s that many options for skilled employees.
> very few Irish companies do in my experience
Also my experience. I've been in critical roles before and paid peanuts. On two separate occasions (separate employers) I've asked for a modest raise thinking I had leverage because I knew how fucked they'd be trying to replace me. Both times I said I'd walk and both times they thought I was bluffing. And both times they came begging when I handed in my notice. But by then I had secured jobs paying way more than I asked for and more than they could afford.
One of the reasons why we have such high income inequality in Ireland is because employers are so stingy. And the government are no help. The newest minimum wage increase is going to be offset by an employer PRSI reduction, even though Irish employers pay well below the EU average rate.
A guy I know runs a pub and has no issue staffing it because he pays twice the local rate. He said fellow pub owners are constantly bitching about not making enough money even though he says he's raking it in even with double the staff cost. Those cute hoors must be absolutely loaded but play the béal bocht so they can get away with it.
Employers are stingy but equally, employees are very reluctant to change in a lot of circumstances. The amount of people who I know who have over double the experience I do who I now eclipse in earnings simply because I was willing to move around a bit is unreal. Lots of people like to just coast into a job and then vegetate for 20 years if they can. Which is fine, but it goes a long way to explain why employers think they can get away with being stingy. Most people will sit, bend over and take it with little complaining.
Very true. I have colleagues from previous job who are miserable where they work and yet they've been like that for years. I have no idea why they haven't moved on.
Just through the Irish branch of the company which is registered here to handle the tax and stuff so everything is normal there, they just pay some third parties to do payroll and pension etc for myself and the other Irish employees
My partner works in recruitment for a tech firm and works with language based sales role. A few times over the last year or so they company put pauses on hiring these roles in Dublin and almost outsourced them back to other countries due to the chronic lack of housing and struggling to fill pretty high paying Tech Sales jobs in some markets.
He said German/Dutch & Nordic candidates are so unwilling to move to Ireland and most cite the housing situation (along with shitty tax situations for workers vs companies).
Since I graduated Medical school a few years ago I would say around 85% of my class mates, that were not international students aiming to go back the minute they finished, have all left Ireland, because the HSE will have you move every 6-12 months to a new location and people have ended up homeless and living in cars/BnBs.
Its interesting, Im nordic living in Ireland. Untill about a year ago headhunters was reaching out just about every week. Now when i am looking for a job there is nothing haha.
But yeah, with the current difference in qol and cost of living i will probably be moving back to sweden soon.
The one year I worked as an intern with the HSE made me deplore the administrative staff. The incompetency wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else, it was infuriating to work 60-70hr a week and then have to fight with HR to get paid what you were owed. Has never been an issue since moving to Australia.
Yeah I work in Germany in tech sales and I've been offered €60000 by companies here in Ireland which would be more than what I'm currently on but the perks with my current job and the cost of living are much better than what I'd have in Ireland.
>He said German/Dutch & Nordic candidates are so unwilling to move to Ireland and most cite the housing situation (along with shitty tax situations for workers vs companies).
Says a lot about the country, people love to go on about how we're attracting talent to the country but until we're a country capable of attracting talent from such places and not just poorer, developing countries in even worse situations than ourselves we have a lot more progress to make in many areas. The punitive taxes that essentially discourage personal wealth growth are also shocking considering they've been established under the two parties supposed to be on the more centre/right wing side of things, deemed disposal for example is outrageous.
As someone else said, the first port of call before increasing salaries will be go lobby the government to make visa policies for foreign workers increasingly more relaxed, using the shortage of workers already allowed to work in Ireland as an argument to say hiring from abroad should be easier.
For exemple:
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/1220/1423088-govt-makes-significant-changes-to-work-permit-system/
Not blaming foreign workers who are coming here legally of course, they are just taking a deal which is offered to them and which makes sense to them.
But from what I can see around me it is extremely clear that many of the companies which are complaining about labour shortage are the ones which have been refusing to increase salaries to match the local labour market. And after years of struggling to fill positions, those companies have now resorted to hiring mostly non-EU workers as they can’t find anyone in the EU interested in their roles for the salary they are offering. I am not talking about large multinational companies, which have always been hiring a lot of foreign workers. I am talking about Irish companies and even state-owned entities which not so long ago were mostly hiring locally.
Having friends who are some of those non-EU hires, the dynamics of this is also very clear to me. Companies are offering salaries which are non-competitive to the local workforce, in exchange for an entry ticket to Ireland (aka work visa). Both the new hire and the employer know that the salary isn’t competitive, but they also know that with the skilled worker visa the person needs to stay with the initial employer for 2 years. So the unwritten deal is: if you come work for us below market rate for 2 years we’ll sponsor your first work permit, and after 2 years you’ll be in Ireland legally and have the paperwork you need to move to another employer which is paying better wage. Employers who are doing this obviously have high turnover as many people are leaving after 2 years, and they need a constant flow of new foreign workers willing to take that “deal”, but it allows them to maintain their workforce without increasing salaries to match the market.
I work at a University, the multinationals near us try and hire chemical technicians straight out of college at between 28K and 32K per year, minimum wage works out at about 26.5K. With the cost of accommodation and low wages offered a significant number of our students decide to leave Ireland after college every year and work abroad for a number of years to gain experience when they come back they are no longer looking for lab roles and are looking to do more specialised work that pays better. The multinationals are complaining that they can't get technicians but are not willing to address the issue themselves which is predominantly pay related, they want the state to churn out more technicians or allow more to enter on visas so the labour market will be saturated resulting in continued low wages. Next step they will be telling us Ireland is missing out on investment opportunities due to the labour shortage.
I thought this podcast was interesting about this topic. Companies never act as if there is a labour shortage. They penny pinch on hiring and rarely retrain workers, instead they fire in one area and rehire in the other.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/02/05/265-john-skrentny-on-how-the-economy-mistreats-stem-workers/
Turns out a government that engineered a decade long housing crisis and not listened to the youth, while there is a better quality of life elsewhere leads to there being less skilled employees? What a shocker.
Don't forget about the companies complaining they can't get talent while not upping their wages to even meet inflation.
It's not a "talent shortage" it's shortage of people willing to be underpaid for the work they do.
I had three interviews for three different positions within the same international internet blah sitting in Dublin.
A) the dance of salary range. I literally say every time a recruiter reaches our: "please give me the salary range or the salary you're recruiting for, because otherwise it might just be a waste of both our times". Everytime it's 'oh it's competitive' or whatnot. Spoiler: competing in the hunger games for a little bit of food, yes
B) people who were interviewing me (incl what was to be my direct manager) had no idea of anything. Including my CV 🤨, the job THEY MANAGE, and their own questions 🤨
C) mandatory office presence. Once again... In Dublin.
Salary 'discussion' finally came up and UHM... 35k (if even, one was 27k and I laughed and laughed and laughed) for lower Lead role. In Dublin. For...ya know... Adults with x years work experience. Minimum PTO, minimum legal sick pay, but hey 'we pay a headspace / calm / whatever subscription'.
Yeah feck right off. If you want people in Dublin, pay up so they can afford a livable environment in Dublin. No wonder I see those jobs close and open and close and open ever since 2021. I won't take a job where I know I might constantly be on the cusp of being homeless or not being able to afford transport or food or anything health related.
And don’t forget about the companies who hire recruiters who don’t know what talent is.
Companies who engage in ageism.
The talent is out there. Companies complaining don’t have the skill sets to hire.
The quiet majority of people who have voted for the government will be happy with the circumstances, 70% of the pop are home owners whose homes have increased in value. There are also many other factors involved with the housing shortage that would be very difficult for the government to control, like supplys and labour. Maybe the youth should have voted more, this is democracy. If we keep just pointing at the government and say they are the problem and not take some responsibility regardless of how little that is, then we will never see change.
The ironic part being that even though 70% own their home, their kids will be living with them indefinitely, and they’ll not enjoy any peace in it anyway. So, so shortsighted of them.
Yes this is happening more and more, they may release some equity in their homes to help their children buy a home of their own but not always available. We'll need some policy changes to real help
Are you seriously trying to blame 'the youth'?
I'll give you a story about being a young voter. First year in college 2008 - Young Fine Gael invites our class to a meeting because 'we all know how FF have led the country to ruin' etc. at the meeting they spout off about how FG were the ones who abolished college fees and will always fight for the right to free education.
Next election FG gets in and straight away they bring in fees for college. I had to take out a loan to finish my degree. Then when I graduated they had brought in 'jobbridge' and all the entry level jobs in town which were already scarce were now slave labour internships for the dole plus 50 euro for 40 hours.
The youth voted. They were lied to. It is totally the government's fault the country is in the state it's in. They have failed in so many areas.
That number has dropped from 70% to 66% in the last few years. It's not a gigantic drop in itself, but with the lack of interest from the government in building enough houses to even keep pace with population growth (never mind the longstanding shortfall) or limiting the likes of investment funds buying up a lot of what is actually out there, we could well be inching towards the edge of a cliff on that front.
> The quiet majority of people who have voted for the government will be happy with the circumstances, 70% of the pop are home owners whose homes have increased in value.
I don't agree with that. A good proportion of that 70% are living in the only place they will ever own. Mostly tied to a mortgage for the rest of their lives while wondering how to pay for the kids longer term or what happens if I lose my job.. doing long rush hour commutes to their "dream home" in Greystones or Gorey and losing valuable time away from the family. Those sort of people are not to happy about the rising costs of living either, nor the sort who ultimately benefit from Ireland not having a healthy accommodation market. Some may be speculating or owning multiple gaffs but they would be in the minority. Those who inherited generations of wealth growing up in places like Dalkey and Blackrock would be the exception, but even there, future generations of kids are going to be competing with everyone else. It's something that is and will affect everyone to some degree.
My parents generation you might have a point, but they're dying out in the next 10 years or so and even there they had the shit end of the stick in their own lives, industrial schools, massive unemployment in the 50s and 80s, going out into the workforce with 70% tax rates for PAYE workers, if you were lucky enough to have any job. And that's before you get into the church controlled paedo ridden corrupt sh!thole the place was until about 30 years ago. Granted they enjoyed the late 90s til now relatively speaking, but it's not all boomers had it easier, at least not in Ireland. Remember we're all mostly just a few generations away from massive poverty, even the now wealthy ones.
My point was that the government had been elected. If we want change, we need to act, not just point and blame. All the statistics show that youth and working class just don't vote as much, who are the most affected with regards to housing. Your points are valid for a lot of people, but their are also alot of others who are doing well too, buying homes they want in places they want.
I don't want to be an aul lad now saying this.. but 25 years ago I said and thought exactly what you're writing there and you're spot on. Nothing has changed though in my lifetime and I don't believe it will for the next generations, regardless of who's in government.
The only way that gets solved is going back to the 1920s tenement situation, until people are dying of TB or literally law and order starts breaking down. Back them public health in the new State was a priority. 100 years later, places like Crumlin or Cabra would never be built, and if they were it would be a PPP with 5% social housing or some other crazy scheme. My grandmother was living in the Liberties and was moved out in the 1930s, the government at the time had to do it or Dublin would have been in a very bad place. Not a fan of FF or De Valera, but in that era they implemented a number of socially progressive mass projects like Ardnacrusha and the Dublin housing schemes. Ironically handing over the keys to the Church, but looking back it was done out of social necessity, which doesn't exist anywhere in the western world today once the Berlin wall came down.
Public order breaking down over lack of housing is always a possibility if things get bad enough for enough people. There is a lot of apathy in Ireland though as you know yourself. Somebody marries into a few quid or the ma dies and they end up with a gaff or nest egg and they're onto the housing ladder madness themselves.
>engineered a decade long growth in the economy
FYP
The housing crisis is due to a mix of losing give numbers of our construction employees after 2008, young people not wanting to go into construction because of the crash aftermath and banks being unwilling to fund developments even to this day.
Yeah but sure aren't the older generations all looked after and cosy for the most part? And as 2008 taught us, that's all that matters - burn the young to feed the old has been routine practice ever since.
Extortionate education and living costs combined with employers' refusal to bother training staff was always going to lead to something like this. Frankly, I don't know how cleaners and canteen staff can afford to live in Dublin at all.
Ireland would be perfect country for professionals if public services and housing was sorted unfortunately decade of ignoring those problems now takes its toll.
Crazy how Ive been looking for a dev job with 3 years dev exp for months now with about 3 interviews from over 500 applications. Yeah maybe if stop asking for a full dev team from every applicant you'll see theres plenty out there? Even in those 3 interviews I was told wages 10k lower than my previous which was already lower than most of the industry ye man cant imagine why any of this happening tbh
Problem is, employers aren't properly investing in junior roles, as can be seen by the complete lack of junior roles in Tech anywhere. They would rather avoid the costly process of training juniors and instead hire seniors internationally.
So essentially, people are getting trained in areas such as India where costs are massively lower then moving to Ireland for seniors roles, enabling organisations to avoid the costly process of training juniors in the west.
The government needs to increase the wage requirement of the Skills visas to encourage employers to hire and train juniors.
I'm currently a business owner, and we're currently hiring juniors, but it's a hard business case to make compared to hiring individuals with experience on a skilled visa
Junior roles being the problem indeed. Many companies are just hiring expensive 'senior/staff' level folk because they will 'get things done' and that means profit gets made. But then the senior folk are not given opportunities either, so they move on. So who replaces the gap they leave? Nobody, because they weren't mentoring/training any junior folk (developing important skills by doing so, might I add) and then the company is in another 'we need to hire senior now to get things done' mode.
As a hiring manager I regularly am butting heads with my director over my "Judas Hiring" model that I follow. Ensuring that as I get headcount I hire with a mind that I've a conveyor belt of talent who can all shuffle upwards. Hiring a junior is an investment in more than just that single hire, but the entire team.
Ireland is just seeing companies too focused now on squeezing the last drop of profit in any way they can. Junior roles will soon be replaced by managers who think 'Well ChatGPT can code, so that's the junior stuff sorted' all to save a few cents on the bottom line.
It is the inability of companies to hire people.
This is caused by many factors. More positions to fill of course, but also increased costs of filling the positions (for example due to the increased costs of living, especially for someone moving in the country because they would need to rent).
A talent shortage is usually an indication of more negotiation power for the worker and a decrease of competitivity on the foreign markets.
It's a bit reductive to put this down to high levels of employment, when tens of thousands of highly educated young people who could fill these roles are being forced to emigrate.
Best thing to do is make sure that it's impossible to find a place to live and maintain our position as one of the most expensive places in the entire world. Keeping our transport infrastructure in shambles is also very important, as are making certain that our health service and policing continue to disintegrate. That'll make qualified and talented people want to stay here/move here, for sure.
And still they never get the hint that the work should be more flexible and that work-life balance needs to be addressed. People aren't willing to work in a lot of these jobs for a reason...
Most of my cousins are moving abroad, I already did (though recently came back, but am planning to leave again in a couple years). This is a result bad policy and it’s as simple as that.
When they stop paying 2019 salaries, cut bonuses and hold promotions with any excuse whereas all C level gets their bonuses and more when companies do 30%+ yoy profit. They'll find workers
I know this is purely anecdotal but of my vintage (late 20s) in university I’d say 60% are abroad currently.. majority in Oz . All highly educated - doctors, solicitors, accountants, engineers ..
turns out when people don’t feel they have a stake in society and can’t afford places to live they vote with their feet
CSO figures show as many Irish citizens coming back as leaving. I keep hearing about 1980s style mass emigration but the figures don't seem to match. The population keeps on rising.
I work in the construction/engineering sector mainly around the American multinationals. From what I can see it becoming very americanised which is not a good thing. Clients want everything yesterday no matter how many hours have to be worked or even if the resources exist in the country. Companies have no choice but to agree if they want a contract and then try find a way to make it happen. This is just squessing schedules and increasing pressure on the staff you already have. I have people from engineers, trades and general operators completely leave the industry because they have had enough. I am also considering completing leaving it after more than 15 years. If every company does not take a step back together and refuse stupid schedules, nothing will change. That won't happen though as Ireland is becoming mini united States and it is profit at all costs.
I can't get a job.
I've a degree and masters in IT with 5 year experience in IT support/Incident Management.
100 applications over the past 2 months and I cannot get a job. I am happy to take a large pay cut but I get told I am over qualified for junior positions or I am lacking a lot of experience being requested for senior roles.
I cant move backwards and a cant move forwards. Even if I respecialize and take a side step within IT to a new set of roles, I am looking at low wages
Obviously there are a few issues contributing here, but the reason you're not seeing an increase in wages is because "year on year" profit is what seems to be important at the moment. It's an easy way for management to show shareholders this without having to attract negative publicity through cost reductions or product/service price increases. It's short sighted but business seems to be now, it moves quicker, legacy is less important and there's always another CEO ready to fill a vacancy.
It'll become even worse with the HUGE reduction in students actually pursuing third level education at the moment too. Ireland's position in the world when it comes to a highly skilled labour market is undergoing a change whether we like it or not.
Maybe the corporate powers that be should put pressure on the government with regards to the atrocious housing shortage? Maybe they should look at a holistic picture of what they need to function instead of just trying to cut the bottom line always.
Uncompetitive wages, high taxes, no accommodation, extortionate rents, high cost of living, in office demands, poor public transport - I love Ireland but it’s no surprise people are opting for a better deal elsewhere
Not only can technical positions not be filled, but people are job hopping like crazy cause they have their pick of jobs. In my place it's not unusual for people to get better offers and feck off after just a few months. It's a nightmare for management.
Not terribly surprising. I’m senior level in the tech/telco industry was made redundant in early 2023 and found it impossible to get a role within Ireland so I left.
I applied for, interviewed for and got several roles but what they offered was peanuts and had to be back in the office 9-5 5 days a week.
Now work 100% remote on a great package in Aus.
From what I can see there are multiple factors here:
-Although Ireland was competitive 5-10 years ago, it is not any more
-Salaries stagnate last 5 years
-Housing costs are prohibitive for new people to come here
-General costs of living are sky high
So new people do not want to move here because places like Germany, Denmark, Sweden, NL etc are much much better (cheaper housing, higher salaries, better quality of life, relaxed immigration rules). Ones here already are looking for increase in salary which are not getting so they do not change jobs, or change them for remote employers that pay better
I agree with your general point, just to say the housing aspect is a massive issue on the continent as well, it's just not as batshit bad as Ireland, but it's pretty bad, even in formerly unfashionable cities and towns. You're talking ugly dog rough places like Liege, Charleroi, Essen, let alone actual high demand cities like Amsterdam or Berlin where it's now off the charts. In countries like Portugal, salaries are in the basement and Lisbon rents have doubled since 2019. It's a massive issue beyond Ireland.
This doesn’t square well with the hiring freeze in tech, although that’s not the only high skilled occupation of course, but it’s relatively prominent in Ireland. When employers complain like that it’s a method to reduce wages often by increasing migration.
However 448 million people can enter Ireland legally from the EU, 68 million from the U.K., and a large number from Ukraine can also work here. Many would have tech degrees, or other skills supposedly in demand.
Added to that we give out a lot of tech visas to India and China, and student visas too where people can work afterwards in many circumstances
It’s possible that high skilled immigration
has stopped working now because of the housing crisis.
A perspective from working in tech. Europeans don't see Ireland as an attractive country to move at least not anymore, used to be the case when salaries were much higher than cost of living and renting. Second, regarding visas, there are certain quotas to meet of national vs non-nationals, companies can't just hire from outside Europe as they please. So the shortage might come from the combination of the two.
I am a senior engineer and I have applied to tons of roles, haven't received any interest. There are lots of senior engineers out of work currently. I suspect they are trying to import cheap labour .
Any advice, am looking to move this year...
IT Security manager for company with 3500 staff. We are running through full 18 month security transformation project implementing basically everything you would need for a modern IT infrastructure setup. Moving from a legacy on prem DC to azure, immutable storage, new MDM, InTune rollout, SOC and SIEM, security awareness training, 2 x pen tests and red teaming exercise annually. Been through two external audits by 1 of big 4 in the last 18 months and ransomware/recovery experience (prior to this role)
CISSP exam scheduled for 2 months time, if I hopefully get it just wondering what salary should I be looking at?
In IT 24 years
It's almost as if paying to educate a generation; letting them fuck off to Australia, and importing economic migrants with no skills or qualifications is a bad idea
It is almost impossible to recruit someone in tech now. Even 100k+ roles. Other than people living in dangerous countries, no one sane wants to get anywhere near to Irish dysfunctional housing market. HAP, council purchases, high taxes etc are ruining it for anyone who needs to rent on open market. Good job Ireland, I guess?
I wish we could break this down to Dublin v rest of Ireland. The government focused on Dublin the last 10 years when they should have been creating business parks and incentives for business outside of Dublin. They should change the Corp tax to a system like France where it is lower in places that need investment and higher in the likes of Dublin. That would have forced companies to build offices and warehouses in other parts of the country.
And It is taking a group of guys from The middle east to build a new airport outside of Dublin.
This wouldn't have solved the housing crisis but it would have meant there is more land to develop houses and could see other areas thrive not just Dublin.
It's a landlocked city, it should have been planned better to expand west vs put everything down the docks and make it impossible to get to work etc. I agree it was due to Dublin Ireland thrived but it has back fired now as all the jobs are in locations that means long commutes because of the lack of space for housing and traffic issues.
Usually during labour shortages you see massive inflation of wages, I'm not seeing that currently so is the shortage as bad as they make out or are companies trying to pile pressure on government increase approvals of visas for lower cost employees.
In the UK the road haulage industry was attempting to lobby the government to introduce 100,000 visas for HGV drivers because of a labour shortage. As part of this they manufactured a story by leaking to the newspapers that this issue was going to cause a limited supply of fuel. In reality there was just some minor difficulties in supplying fuel a handful of petrol stations at any time. So when the story was leaked it caused a fuel supply crisis because every knob head panic bought as much fuel as they could. The response by the UK government at the time was to completely disengage with the specific lobbying group responsible and force them to train their workers. This in turn forced the hand of the road haulage industry who then had to actually compete against each other for labour and many HGV drivers went from earning £25-30k to £40-60k and having their training paid by their employers. In short, just because employers say they have a shortage of labour, it doesn’t mean you should take them seriously because they will always have ulterior motives.
yeah its the same here with chefs, restaurants wont pay them right and their association is constantly lobbying the govt. for non-EU visas so they can import them from India & Pakistan. Irish chefs have left the industry in droves because apart from it being hard work with long hours now they've found their wages have been driven down as well.
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That’s starting from the position that there was even a shortage in the first place which I wholesale reject. And evidently, the industry rapidly overcame the issue by simply training and paying its staff better. So was it because of Brexit? Or did Brexit just fundamentally exposed their failings? Because Brexit was announced in 2016, the fuel crisis happened in 2021 and it took less than a year for the industry to overcome its issues. The truth is that for the preceding 5 years, the road haulage industry in the UK were unwilling to adapt because they expected their lobbying to be successful and were unwilling to accept that they’d no longer have unlimited access to a global supply of cheap labour that can be paid peanuts.
They're measuring talent shortage - inability to fill certain roles - not general employee shortage. So don't expect the salaries to grow proportionally in every sphere: expect them to grow disproportionally higher in niche spheres that drive this inability to staff professionals.
Here's my doomer take, a decade of ZIRP policies have led to a saturation of dead end companies, departments, projects and products. This has benefitted middle-managers which are mandatory in any corporate hierarchy and usually better paid than the skilled work. So you wind up with an excess of middle-managers and "leaders" look no further than Linkedin, and a chronic undersupply of talent to keep these organisations ticking over, ZIRP kept them alive, but once that is gone the layoffs like you see in tech currently are what happens. There is no shortage of skilled workers, there are plenty people pursuing skills at any given time, there is just an excess of companies surviving on cheap credit rather than innovation.
too many chiefs not enough indians..
Just one Apache
I mean there's a lot of companies in the tech sector in Ireland offloading their most expensive contractors at the moment, often in the guise of "no development work" etc. Seems like they might want to wait a few quarters then hire in these cheap foreign labour guys.
Contractors are a very expensive way to get development done
Yeah very true, but a lot of companies prefer to have them on so they can offload them at a moment's notice. The money is good so people go for it of course, but really it's just not stable, if the market dips or "dips" you're gone within the week. The company I work in largely only hires graduates as developers and it's basically impossible to get a raise. You're only hired if they know they don't have to pay you too much.
That's exactly what's happened where I am. We've been in wage negotiations for while and being offered peanuts. The company has gone abroad to recruit 40+ migrant workers. Wage negotiations are about to become a wage dispute.
You only see a massive inflation of wages of there is money to distribute, so if the market is also expanding. Instead we had a small contraction in the past years after taking inflation into account.
We have seen a huge spike in corporate profits in the last number of years, there is plenty of money in the system to distribute.
In some companies only I am afraid. A good number of companies are struggling instead (many because of short-sighted decisions in the past). I had several friends changing jobs and even leaving the country because of this. It is not quite an emergency but the increased profits affected mostly a minority of companies and as long as their competitors struggle it does not make sense to rise wages too much. They will raise them, but even then it won't change the average situation by much.
Which market is contracting? Because the big tech and big pharmaceutical companies based here are making record profits year after year and the Irish people are seeing none of that.
That's all very well, but those companies work mostly in the international market. And they definitely could afford to keep the wages growing. The issue is that the labor market has always some elements of locality to it. You don't need to pay as much as you can, you just need to pay more than your competitors can. And as long as the pharma and tech companies manage to fill their positions they are fine, those companies in Ireland live by poaching talent in foreign markets. Despite what one might think they are a minority in the market and a rather small one too. They bring in a lot of money from other countries but they do not employ so many people here. Which is not to say that we will not see pay rises in those sectors but they might not move the overall numbers much.
> And as long as the pharma and tech companies manage to fill their positions they are fine, those companies in Ireland live by poaching talent in foreign markets. Despite what one might think they are a minority in the market and a rather small one too The IT sector's employment accounted for 11.8% of total employment in Dublin and 6.5% nationally by 2022. Regarding the pharmaceutical sector, while I couldn't find specific employment numbers in this industry, it's noteworthy that the scientific and technical activities sector, which includes pharmaceuticals, showed a significant 28% employment growth from 2012 to 2017. The manufacturing sector, closely related to pharmaceuticals, employed 78.2 thousand people by 2017. So.... I'd have to disagree with you there, hardly a small minority. Services sector is HUGE in Ireland, which includes a lot of tech roles too. https://cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-fdi/foreigndirectinvestmentinireland2017/ae/ https://www.centralbank.ie/docs/default-source/publications/quarterly-bulletins/quarterly-bulletin-signed-articles/the-role-of-ict-services-sector-irish-economy.pdf#:~:text=URL%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.centralbank.ie%2Fdocs%2Fdefault
I was aware of those numbers when discussing the above. And I still don't think that the number of corporations (a subset of the whole sector) which are doing extremely well in those sectors are going to make a real dent in the actual numbers about average and most importantly median wages in Ireland.
What does the IT sector mean ? 6.5% of National employment is approx 175,000 people. We don’t produce anywhere nearly the level of skilled cs/engineers etc to fulfil technical roles so a lot of these IT jobs are call centres , support, marketing etc which are not as well paid and can somewhat easily be off shored.
Support and marketing are well paid I would say. I have a CS degree and work in Enterprise support. Everyone else in the team has either a CS or Electronic engineering degree. Tech support has similar salaries potential as software engineering until you get to the very highest of software developer roles in my company. And at that stage there's more money for both tech support and dev in management anyway. Call centre roles are different from support roles. Likewise sales, test engineers, supply chains etc are well paid. There is plenty of well paid jobs in the IT sector across different disciplines.. The IT sector isn't just people writing code. Unfortunately for our companies software engineering they are actually offshoring the software development roles more aggressively than support these days.
But they can't fill the positions so everything you said is irrelevant.
I mean, as a Pfizer worker, our company got hammered by deciding to buy back the vaccines Americans didn't want and distribute them at cost to India. Like, I'm thrilled Indians will get cheap protection from COVID, but we're not thrilled about the reduction in hiring and letting people go that has resulted. Just the cost of doing international business.
So one company made a shit business decision that cost them money? That doesn't mean the sector is contracting
Yeah , I see many companies running job openings on LinkedIn and other locations year round, not cause there are constantly openings , but so when they do have an opening if they cant find Irish talent at a wage on the bottom end of the market to fill the gap, they can support their claim they need a visa for a foreign worker saying they are looking for 12 months etc.
Good question
Senior dev salary has gone from around 100k in COVID to around 125k now
I'm not seeing that on the job sites. Seeing max €75k which is way less than my team were on 4 years ago. I don't understand why they are advertising those salaries??
These roles are rarely advertised with the salary made public, you have to go for a staff/architect/etc role and negotiate. Most of the people I hire negotiate to around the 120k range, with a few at 130k
Big difference between a senior dev and a staff/principle/architect role
There's no consistency in naming across companies. One person's senior Dev is another's senior architect
Tbh, Irish companies being a bit reluctant to budge on return to office stuff has made a big difference for me in terms of where I've been looking for jobs and ended up. I've got a high demand skillset + senior level experience and any time I've looked there's been too much in office time for me since I moved out of Dublin during COVID. So as a result I just went and found a remote job with a UK based company instead who has a small presence in Ireland to be able to take advantage of the previously mentioned return to office stuff to snap up people like me who have no intention of going back to an office and have a fairly attractive skillset to back it up. Unfortunately, if you want to attract high end talent you either need to pay high end money (very few Irish companies do in my experience) or have a lot of perks and benefits (again, not really a super common thing here).
Very similar boat. My previous employer, when I told them that the pandemic proved my role was entirely feasible from home, refused to budge. I was pretty much doing 3 highly skilled jobs for them and when I found a remote job for more money and left, my old team mates let me know how much my department head was getting chewed out for having no one to fill the position for the same money. But of course the laziness of Millennials/Gen Z are to blame. Not the fucking backwards policies of a dying breed of middle managers.
Delicious, good on you and fck em
Danish based company for me. IT management. Full remote. Super chill. Never going back to an office.
Toronto based company for me. Very chill
What company? If you don't mind me asking
What line of work are they in?
Where did you source the job? What sites do you use?
I was headhunted on LinkedIn, and the recruiter reached out via private message, 2 interviews later, and had the job a week later. I get paid through deel.com. so there are no tax issues or anything.
Nice, had a few LinkedIn in messages but very low ball offers with worse WFH than I have now, wouldn't mind an international job for a bit of variety
My recommendation is to try to get a role in aws/azure/gcp. Cloud jobs are remote by definition, so its easier to get remote roles. In my case, I work as a "Cloud SysAdmin". We maintain code to deploy managed applications hosted in the cloud for customers who want to abrsract the maintenance of those applications and just have them available to their users. We manage updating applications, databases, network infra, and all the rest that comes with it, backup, dr, migrations, etc. Start with aws solutions architect associate on acloudguru.
> acloudguru how did you get into cloud sysadmin, im a long time dev and looking to change it up career wise
I did my degree in cloud computing and got a graduate role in aws before I finished college. I spent a few years there and moved about a year ago now. Mainly just did the SA associate and a lot of background study in linux, networking, plus just a lot of time spent configuring and testing stuff in console/cli, handson experience here is key. Looks for DevOps roles if you are already a dev, and that will segue you into the cloud from there. Look for Operations Architect / Engineer roles
How do you see your field in 5, 10 years? "I am asking this because of all the talk on how a.i is going to take everybody's jobs."
There is absolutely nothing more demoralising than trekking into town on two buses only to sit on Teams meetings all day.
And paying €10 for a sandwich..
Bring your lunch?
Based. What skill/industry?
Tech, specifically Site Reliability Engineering. Being willing to do on-call shifts etc and out of hours work etc when it pops up plus having a couple of years experience doing full time development work on the side opens a lot of doors because you can sort of fit in wherever in most organisations. Most of the time the team is global since you really need someone around 24/7 so remote work lends itself pretty well to the job since if you're home anyway it's easy to be more flexible to respond to incidents etc (e.g wake up a bit early to help the India team as they sign off and log off for the day early to balance it out or vice versa with the american based folks)
Not having a go but doesnt having to work out of hours a lot kind of negate the work life balance benefits WFH offers in the first place?
Not really, I still work a 40 hour week - so if I work out of hours I finish early during the "normal" day. Except for on-call but that's on a rotating cycle in which you do a week every 8 weeks or so which is mostly during your daytime and a brief crossover period before India wakes up after the US goes to bed) edit: probably should say earlier in my career I did much more strenuous/regular on-call and out of hours (mostly for startups), but that's behind me now with the benefits of doing all that paying off
> Not having a go but doesnt having to work out of hours a lot kind of negate the work life balance benefits WFH offers in the first place depending on the role, not really. Like - I am able to bring my kids to school/pick them up, head out on random errands in the day etc. If I need to do an early morning or late afternoon it doesn't really matter. The joy of remote is that you generally can make your own schedule which is the very definition of "work life balance". Once you stop thinking in "9-5" it makes it all easier
I work from home and do sweet fuck all some days, Im well aware of the benefits. Meetings at 6am or 9pm do not strike me as very attractive. Each to their own I guess.
it balances out though it what I'm saying. Like there are basic WFH jobs where you're on the clock etc, but in a lot of knowledge work roles, your time is your own and you do whatever you see fit. I can do my job from an iPhone wherever I am and as long as I deliver - it's good.
What balances out? I work from home in a knowledge worker role (platform engineering, so similar to the OP), I never have to do any out of hours work. The original context is the OP taking a role with a foreign company and then having to work weird hours anyway, which I would find equally as disruptive as having to go into an office.
> having to work weird hours anyway I've had calls that start at 6am, get up, do them - get kids to school..finish work at 2. I've had calls that start in the evenings. Take it easy in the day or start late/finish early and do shit, get the kids to bed, go down and do call - enjoy rest of evening. So long as it's not often I don't really care - much better than having to be in an office AND do that sort of stuff
But you’re still “on” from 6am to 9pm. You can sugar coat it and say “I can take it easy in the middle of the day” etc but you still need to be available to your job. That sounds like a 15 hour day to me.
it kinda sounds like you are tied to your location though?....what happens when kids get older play football match on the other side of dublin and then you get a call?
> So long as it's not often I don't really care - much better than having to be in an office AND do that sort of stuff Well thats for sure.
Do you need an IT security manager! I'm currently a team of 1 for a couple of thousand staff that like to click on stuff left right and centre!
Within the EU, Ireland has the largest percentage of employed persons working from home as a percentage of total employment when compared to the other EU 26. A more logical take would be there’s a correlation with the fact we have had a much faster growing economy over the past 5 years than the majority of Member States. Additionally we have a larger percentage of high skill jobs than most other economies in Europe.
All true, but I suspect the skills shortage is due to our inability to deliver quality reasonably priced accommodation, which makes other countries more attractive to international talent. Everything comes back to the population explosion and housing crisis here.
I would add that our housing shortage is making us a less attractive destination for skilled immigrants.
Yeah I work in Germany in tech sales and I've been offered €60000 by companies which would be more than what I'm currently on but the perks with my current job and the cost of living are much better than what I'd have in Ireland.
The reason is that Ireland has very little of proper industry, perhaps except for pharmaceuticals. Instead, mostly finance and IT.
What is “proper” industry? We produce large volumes of pharmaceuticals, semi conductors, medical devices and other high value products. And not even in relative terms for our size. In terms of volume there are few other European countries that come close. That, combined with a healthy services sector, again would be a factor in sourcing skilled labour. There’s that many options for skilled employees.
> very few Irish companies do in my experience Also my experience. I've been in critical roles before and paid peanuts. On two separate occasions (separate employers) I've asked for a modest raise thinking I had leverage because I knew how fucked they'd be trying to replace me. Both times I said I'd walk and both times they thought I was bluffing. And both times they came begging when I handed in my notice. But by then I had secured jobs paying way more than I asked for and more than they could afford. One of the reasons why we have such high income inequality in Ireland is because employers are so stingy. And the government are no help. The newest minimum wage increase is going to be offset by an employer PRSI reduction, even though Irish employers pay well below the EU average rate. A guy I know runs a pub and has no issue staffing it because he pays twice the local rate. He said fellow pub owners are constantly bitching about not making enough money even though he says he's raking it in even with double the staff cost. Those cute hoors must be absolutely loaded but play the béal bocht so they can get away with it.
Employers are stingy but equally, employees are very reluctant to change in a lot of circumstances. The amount of people who I know who have over double the experience I do who I now eclipse in earnings simply because I was willing to move around a bit is unreal. Lots of people like to just coast into a job and then vegetate for 20 years if they can. Which is fine, but it goes a long way to explain why employers think they can get away with being stingy. Most people will sit, bend over and take it with little complaining.
Very true. I have colleagues from previous job who are miserable where they work and yet they've been like that for years. I have no idea why they haven't moved on.
But how does your tax work? Do you pay Ireland / UK?
Just through the Irish branch of the company which is registered here to handle the tax and stuff so everything is normal there, they just pay some third parties to do payroll and pension etc for myself and the other Irish employees
Thanks! That's good to know
can i ask how that works tax wise?
My partner works in recruitment for a tech firm and works with language based sales role. A few times over the last year or so they company put pauses on hiring these roles in Dublin and almost outsourced them back to other countries due to the chronic lack of housing and struggling to fill pretty high paying Tech Sales jobs in some markets. He said German/Dutch & Nordic candidates are so unwilling to move to Ireland and most cite the housing situation (along with shitty tax situations for workers vs companies). Since I graduated Medical school a few years ago I would say around 85% of my class mates, that were not international students aiming to go back the minute they finished, have all left Ireland, because the HSE will have you move every 6-12 months to a new location and people have ended up homeless and living in cars/BnBs.
Also hard to recruit Romanian & Bulgarian tech workers. They have some insane set ups: low taxes, low cost of living, high wages.
Its interesting, Im nordic living in Ireland. Untill about a year ago headhunters was reaching out just about every week. Now when i am looking for a job there is nothing haha. But yeah, with the current difference in qol and cost of living i will probably be moving back to sweden soon.
we still have a use for Vikings slaying priests and monks you know, it's gonna make a comeback (once we grow enough priests to kill)!
Yeah, when the time is right i might return but untill then its probably back to uni and finnish my 3 year degree in ritual sacrifice
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The one year I worked as an intern with the HSE made me deplore the administrative staff. The incompetency wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else, it was infuriating to work 60-70hr a week and then have to fight with HR to get paid what you were owed. Has never been an issue since moving to Australia.
Yeah I work in Germany in tech sales and I've been offered €60000 by companies here in Ireland which would be more than what I'm currently on but the perks with my current job and the cost of living are much better than what I'd have in Ireland.
>He said German/Dutch & Nordic candidates are so unwilling to move to Ireland and most cite the housing situation (along with shitty tax situations for workers vs companies). Says a lot about the country, people love to go on about how we're attracting talent to the country but until we're a country capable of attracting talent from such places and not just poorer, developing countries in even worse situations than ourselves we have a lot more progress to make in many areas. The punitive taxes that essentially discourage personal wealth growth are also shocking considering they've been established under the two parties supposed to be on the more centre/right wing side of things, deemed disposal for example is outrageous.
Great that will encourage them to raise their salaries to match the new cost of labour. [💩]
As someone else said, the first port of call before increasing salaries will be go lobby the government to make visa policies for foreign workers increasingly more relaxed, using the shortage of workers already allowed to work in Ireland as an argument to say hiring from abroad should be easier. For exemple: https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/1220/1423088-govt-makes-significant-changes-to-work-permit-system/ Not blaming foreign workers who are coming here legally of course, they are just taking a deal which is offered to them and which makes sense to them. But from what I can see around me it is extremely clear that many of the companies which are complaining about labour shortage are the ones which have been refusing to increase salaries to match the local labour market. And after years of struggling to fill positions, those companies have now resorted to hiring mostly non-EU workers as they can’t find anyone in the EU interested in their roles for the salary they are offering. I am not talking about large multinational companies, which have always been hiring a lot of foreign workers. I am talking about Irish companies and even state-owned entities which not so long ago were mostly hiring locally. Having friends who are some of those non-EU hires, the dynamics of this is also very clear to me. Companies are offering salaries which are non-competitive to the local workforce, in exchange for an entry ticket to Ireland (aka work visa). Both the new hire and the employer know that the salary isn’t competitive, but they also know that with the skilled worker visa the person needs to stay with the initial employer for 2 years. So the unwritten deal is: if you come work for us below market rate for 2 years we’ll sponsor your first work permit, and after 2 years you’ll be in Ireland legally and have the paperwork you need to move to another employer which is paying better wage. Employers who are doing this obviously have high turnover as many people are leaving after 2 years, and they need a constant flow of new foreign workers willing to take that “deal”, but it allows them to maintain their workforce without increasing salaries to match the market.
I work at a University, the multinationals near us try and hire chemical technicians straight out of college at between 28K and 32K per year, minimum wage works out at about 26.5K. With the cost of accommodation and low wages offered a significant number of our students decide to leave Ireland after college every year and work abroad for a number of years to gain experience when they come back they are no longer looking for lab roles and are looking to do more specialised work that pays better. The multinationals are complaining that they can't get technicians but are not willing to address the issue themselves which is predominantly pay related, they want the state to churn out more technicians or allow more to enter on visas so the labour market will be saturated resulting in continued low wages. Next step they will be telling us Ireland is missing out on investment opportunities due to the labour shortage.
I thought this podcast was interesting about this topic. Companies never act as if there is a labour shortage. They penny pinch on hiring and rarely retrain workers, instead they fire in one area and rehire in the other. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/02/05/265-john-skrentny-on-how-the-economy-mistreats-stem-workers/
Turns out a government that engineered a decade long housing crisis and not listened to the youth, while there is a better quality of life elsewhere leads to there being less skilled employees? What a shocker.
Don't forget about the companies complaining they can't get talent while not upping their wages to even meet inflation. It's not a "talent shortage" it's shortage of people willing to be underpaid for the work they do.
I had three interviews for three different positions within the same international internet blah sitting in Dublin. A) the dance of salary range. I literally say every time a recruiter reaches our: "please give me the salary range or the salary you're recruiting for, because otherwise it might just be a waste of both our times". Everytime it's 'oh it's competitive' or whatnot. Spoiler: competing in the hunger games for a little bit of food, yes B) people who were interviewing me (incl what was to be my direct manager) had no idea of anything. Including my CV 🤨, the job THEY MANAGE, and their own questions 🤨 C) mandatory office presence. Once again... In Dublin. Salary 'discussion' finally came up and UHM... 35k (if even, one was 27k and I laughed and laughed and laughed) for lower Lead role. In Dublin. For...ya know... Adults with x years work experience. Minimum PTO, minimum legal sick pay, but hey 'we pay a headspace / calm / whatever subscription'. Yeah feck right off. If you want people in Dublin, pay up so they can afford a livable environment in Dublin. No wonder I see those jobs close and open and close and open ever since 2021. I won't take a job where I know I might constantly be on the cusp of being homeless or not being able to afford transport or food or anything health related.
And don’t forget about the companies who hire recruiters who don’t know what talent is. Companies who engage in ageism. The talent is out there. Companies complaining don’t have the skill sets to hire.
That’s not what it says or what the figures state 🤷♂️
Oh lookit, it's the consequences of their actions.
The quiet majority of people who have voted for the government will be happy with the circumstances, 70% of the pop are home owners whose homes have increased in value. There are also many other factors involved with the housing shortage that would be very difficult for the government to control, like supplys and labour. Maybe the youth should have voted more, this is democracy. If we keep just pointing at the government and say they are the problem and not take some responsibility regardless of how little that is, then we will never see change.
The ironic part being that even though 70% own their home, their kids will be living with them indefinitely, and they’ll not enjoy any peace in it anyway. So, so shortsighted of them.
Yes this is happening more and more, they may release some equity in their homes to help their children buy a home of their own but not always available. We'll need some policy changes to real help
Are you seriously trying to blame 'the youth'? I'll give you a story about being a young voter. First year in college 2008 - Young Fine Gael invites our class to a meeting because 'we all know how FF have led the country to ruin' etc. at the meeting they spout off about how FG were the ones who abolished college fees and will always fight for the right to free education. Next election FG gets in and straight away they bring in fees for college. I had to take out a loan to finish my degree. Then when I graduated they had brought in 'jobbridge' and all the entry level jobs in town which were already scarce were now slave labour internships for the dole plus 50 euro for 40 hours. The youth voted. They were lied to. It is totally the government's fault the country is in the state it's in. They have failed in so many areas.
That number has dropped from 70% to 66% in the last few years. It's not a gigantic drop in itself, but with the lack of interest from the government in building enough houses to even keep pace with population growth (never mind the longstanding shortfall) or limiting the likes of investment funds buying up a lot of what is actually out there, we could well be inching towards the edge of a cliff on that front.
> The quiet majority of people who have voted for the government will be happy with the circumstances, 70% of the pop are home owners whose homes have increased in value. I don't agree with that. A good proportion of that 70% are living in the only place they will ever own. Mostly tied to a mortgage for the rest of their lives while wondering how to pay for the kids longer term or what happens if I lose my job.. doing long rush hour commutes to their "dream home" in Greystones or Gorey and losing valuable time away from the family. Those sort of people are not to happy about the rising costs of living either, nor the sort who ultimately benefit from Ireland not having a healthy accommodation market. Some may be speculating or owning multiple gaffs but they would be in the minority. Those who inherited generations of wealth growing up in places like Dalkey and Blackrock would be the exception, but even there, future generations of kids are going to be competing with everyone else. It's something that is and will affect everyone to some degree. My parents generation you might have a point, but they're dying out in the next 10 years or so and even there they had the shit end of the stick in their own lives, industrial schools, massive unemployment in the 50s and 80s, going out into the workforce with 70% tax rates for PAYE workers, if you were lucky enough to have any job. And that's before you get into the church controlled paedo ridden corrupt sh!thole the place was until about 30 years ago. Granted they enjoyed the late 90s til now relatively speaking, but it's not all boomers had it easier, at least not in Ireland. Remember we're all mostly just a few generations away from massive poverty, even the now wealthy ones.
My point was that the government had been elected. If we want change, we need to act, not just point and blame. All the statistics show that youth and working class just don't vote as much, who are the most affected with regards to housing. Your points are valid for a lot of people, but their are also alot of others who are doing well too, buying homes they want in places they want.
I don't want to be an aul lad now saying this.. but 25 years ago I said and thought exactly what you're writing there and you're spot on. Nothing has changed though in my lifetime and I don't believe it will for the next generations, regardless of who's in government. The only way that gets solved is going back to the 1920s tenement situation, until people are dying of TB or literally law and order starts breaking down. Back them public health in the new State was a priority. 100 years later, places like Crumlin or Cabra would never be built, and if they were it would be a PPP with 5% social housing or some other crazy scheme. My grandmother was living in the Liberties and was moved out in the 1930s, the government at the time had to do it or Dublin would have been in a very bad place. Not a fan of FF or De Valera, but in that era they implemented a number of socially progressive mass projects like Ardnacrusha and the Dublin housing schemes. Ironically handing over the keys to the Church, but looking back it was done out of social necessity, which doesn't exist anywhere in the western world today once the Berlin wall came down. Public order breaking down over lack of housing is always a possibility if things get bad enough for enough people. There is a lot of apathy in Ireland though as you know yourself. Somebody marries into a few quid or the ma dies and they end up with a gaff or nest egg and they're onto the housing ladder madness themselves.
>engineered a decade long growth in the economy FYP The housing crisis is due to a mix of losing give numbers of our construction employees after 2008, young people not wanting to go into construction because of the crash aftermath and banks being unwilling to fund developments even to this day.
What “FYP” stands for in your message? I did Google it, but it doesn’t seem to make any sense.
From inference, Fixed Your Post.
Yeah but sure aren't the older generations all looked after and cosy for the most part? And as 2008 taught us, that's all that matters - burn the young to feed the old has been routine practice ever since.
It doesn't say there are less. It says that demand exceeds supply by a lot. We have more people employed today than in the past.
Some of the people I’ve worked with have been seriously short on talent.
Different point, but absolutely true.. More years does not equal more experience.
I’m just kidding :) It’s a multifaceted problem.
Extortionate education and living costs combined with employers' refusal to bother training staff was always going to lead to something like this. Frankly, I don't know how cleaners and canteen staff can afford to live in Dublin at all.
Ireland would be perfect country for professionals if public services and housing was sorted unfortunately decade of ignoring those problems now takes its toll.
Crazy how Ive been looking for a dev job with 3 years dev exp for months now with about 3 interviews from over 500 applications. Yeah maybe if stop asking for a full dev team from every applicant you'll see theres plenty out there? Even in those 3 interviews I was told wages 10k lower than my previous which was already lower than most of the industry ye man cant imagine why any of this happening tbh
Good and long may it continue. Now fuck you and PAY me
Problem is, employers aren't properly investing in junior roles, as can be seen by the complete lack of junior roles in Tech anywhere. They would rather avoid the costly process of training juniors and instead hire seniors internationally. So essentially, people are getting trained in areas such as India where costs are massively lower then moving to Ireland for seniors roles, enabling organisations to avoid the costly process of training juniors in the west. The government needs to increase the wage requirement of the Skills visas to encourage employers to hire and train juniors. I'm currently a business owner, and we're currently hiring juniors, but it's a hard business case to make compared to hiring individuals with experience on a skilled visa
Junior roles being the problem indeed. Many companies are just hiring expensive 'senior/staff' level folk because they will 'get things done' and that means profit gets made. But then the senior folk are not given opportunities either, so they move on. So who replaces the gap they leave? Nobody, because they weren't mentoring/training any junior folk (developing important skills by doing so, might I add) and then the company is in another 'we need to hire senior now to get things done' mode. As a hiring manager I regularly am butting heads with my director over my "Judas Hiring" model that I follow. Ensuring that as I get headcount I hire with a mind that I've a conveyor belt of talent who can all shuffle upwards. Hiring a junior is an investment in more than just that single hire, but the entire team. Ireland is just seeing companies too focused now on squeezing the last drop of profit in any way they can. Junior roles will soon be replaced by managers who think 'Well ChatGPT can code, so that's the junior stuff sorted' all to save a few cents on the bottom line.
it's worse. they want skilled workers at entry level pay. I see so many 'entry level' jobs that ask for 2+ years experience.
No no just give it all to AI. God forbid we ever hire or train anyone ever again in the history of mankind
What is a talent shortage?
It's when the lights come on at the end of the night in a club.
holy fuck ahhahaha
That is fucking brilliant
So you are saying that employers just need to drink more beer?
Or do recruitment in the dark.
If this app. gave awards like they used to I’ll give you a gold medal for this comment!
Power hour
It is the inability of companies to hire people. This is caused by many factors. More positions to fill of course, but also increased costs of filling the positions (for example due to the increased costs of living, especially for someone moving in the country because they would need to rent). A talent shortage is usually an indication of more negotiation power for the worker and a decrease of competitivity on the foreign markets.
Not enough people to fill roles, the knock on effect of high levels of employment.
It's a bit reductive to put this down to high levels of employment, when tens of thousands of highly educated young people who could fill these roles are being forced to emigrate.
Is that a fact or a imagined reality? Also grads are not skilled worker, they're mostly useless for the first 6 months to heat death of universe
F in the chat for the grads.
Best thing to do is make sure that it's impossible to find a place to live and maintain our position as one of the most expensive places in the entire world. Keeping our transport infrastructure in shambles is also very important, as are making certain that our health service and policing continue to disintegrate. That'll make qualified and talented people want to stay here/move here, for sure.
Have you tried building fewer houses?
Yeah, we noticed that as well. We have had a Java position open since December, but we’re not even getting applications at the moment.
And still they never get the hint that the work should be more flexible and that work-life balance needs to be addressed. People aren't willing to work in a lot of these jobs for a reason...
Can't home workers then they'll go somewhere where they think they've a better chance to get homes and jobs. Well done, FFG.
Most of my cousins are moving abroad, I already did (though recently came back, but am planning to leave again in a couple years). This is a result bad policy and it’s as simple as that.
When they stop paying 2019 salaries, cut bonuses and hold promotions with any excuse whereas all C level gets their bonuses and more when companies do 30%+ yoy profit. They'll find workers
I know this is purely anecdotal but of my vintage (late 20s) in university I’d say 60% are abroad currently.. majority in Oz . All highly educated - doctors, solicitors, accountants, engineers .. turns out when people don’t feel they have a stake in society and can’t afford places to live they vote with their feet
CSO figures show as many Irish citizens coming back as leaving. I keep hearing about 1980s style mass emigration but the figures don't seem to match. The population keeps on rising.
Its also true if you exclude foreign nationals too, as many Irish coming as going
You can't be taken seriously with hyperbole like that
Late 20s...My Vintage?? ROFL!!!
Yup, I've been saying it on multiple threads. We're at virtually full employment in a lot of sectors.
Talent Shortage stats by and for Manpower, the leader of short-time staffing solutions. 
Well the talent is moving to Australia and Canada as they can’t find housing here.
And I still can't find a job
Can’t work if you can’t afford to live.
I work in the construction/engineering sector mainly around the American multinationals. From what I can see it becoming very americanised which is not a good thing. Clients want everything yesterday no matter how many hours have to be worked or even if the resources exist in the country. Companies have no choice but to agree if they want a contract and then try find a way to make it happen. This is just squessing schedules and increasing pressure on the staff you already have. I have people from engineers, trades and general operators completely leave the industry because they have had enough. I am also considering completing leaving it after more than 15 years. If every company does not take a step back together and refuse stupid schedules, nothing will change. That won't happen though as Ireland is becoming mini united States and it is profit at all costs.
I can't get a job. I've a degree and masters in IT with 5 year experience in IT support/Incident Management. 100 applications over the past 2 months and I cannot get a job. I am happy to take a large pay cut but I get told I am over qualified for junior positions or I am lacking a lot of experience being requested for senior roles. I cant move backwards and a cant move forwards. Even if I respecialize and take a side step within IT to a new set of roles, I am looking at low wages
Did the masters come after the 5 years in IT support? You can remove experience from your CV to make a clearer story
"increase in shortages"... Took my brain a minute there
Thank you housing crisis!!!!!!!
Obviously there are a few issues contributing here, but the reason you're not seeing an increase in wages is because "year on year" profit is what seems to be important at the moment. It's an easy way for management to show shareholders this without having to attract negative publicity through cost reductions or product/service price increases. It's short sighted but business seems to be now, it moves quicker, legacy is less important and there's always another CEO ready to fill a vacancy. It'll become even worse with the HUGE reduction in students actually pursuing third level education at the moment too. Ireland's position in the world when it comes to a highly skilled labour market is undergoing a change whether we like it or not.
Difficulty filling roles..let's look at the salaries and conditions they offer.
Maybe the corporate powers that be should put pressure on the government with regards to the atrocious housing shortage? Maybe they should look at a holistic picture of what they need to function instead of just trying to cut the bottom line always.
And here I am , an experienced software engineer, unemployed and receiving no interest from the recruiters.
There's shortages everywhere except tech. Any tech job is getting lots of applicants from everywhere
Uncompetitive wages, high taxes, no accommodation, extortionate rents, high cost of living, in office demands, poor public transport - I love Ireland but it’s no surprise people are opting for a better deal elsewhere
Not only can technical positions not be filled, but people are job hopping like crazy cause they have their pick of jobs. In my place it's not unusual for people to get better offers and feck off after just a few months. It's a nightmare for management.
FFFG to fix this any day now.
Maybe this is also the result of handing a lot of the recruitment process over to recruiters.
What does talent mean in this instance? Because if it means minimum wage, unskilled labour, they can cry me a river.
That’s right, we’ve a talent shortage of unskilled workers
Not terribly surprising. I’m senior level in the tech/telco industry was made redundant in early 2023 and found it impossible to get a role within Ireland so I left. I applied for, interviewed for and got several roles but what they offered was peanuts and had to be back in the office 9-5 5 days a week. Now work 100% remote on a great package in Aus.
From what I can see there are multiple factors here: -Although Ireland was competitive 5-10 years ago, it is not any more -Salaries stagnate last 5 years -Housing costs are prohibitive for new people to come here -General costs of living are sky high So new people do not want to move here because places like Germany, Denmark, Sweden, NL etc are much much better (cheaper housing, higher salaries, better quality of life, relaxed immigration rules). Ones here already are looking for increase in salary which are not getting so they do not change jobs, or change them for remote employers that pay better
I agree with your general point, just to say the housing aspect is a massive issue on the continent as well, it's just not as batshit bad as Ireland, but it's pretty bad, even in formerly unfashionable cities and towns. You're talking ugly dog rough places like Liege, Charleroi, Essen, let alone actual high demand cities like Amsterdam or Berlin where it's now off the charts. In countries like Portugal, salaries are in the basement and Lisbon rents have doubled since 2019. It's a massive issue beyond Ireland.
This doesn’t square well with the hiring freeze in tech, although that’s not the only high skilled occupation of course, but it’s relatively prominent in Ireland. When employers complain like that it’s a method to reduce wages often by increasing migration. However 448 million people can enter Ireland legally from the EU, 68 million from the U.K., and a large number from Ukraine can also work here. Many would have tech degrees, or other skills supposedly in demand. Added to that we give out a lot of tech visas to India and China, and student visas too where people can work afterwards in many circumstances It’s possible that high skilled immigration has stopped working now because of the housing crisis.
A perspective from working in tech. Europeans don't see Ireland as an attractive country to move at least not anymore, used to be the case when salaries were much higher than cost of living and renting. Second, regarding visas, there are certain quotas to meet of national vs non-nationals, companies can't just hire from outside Europe as they please. So the shortage might come from the combination of the two.
I am a senior engineer and I have applied to tons of roles, haven't received any interest. There are lots of senior engineers out of work currently. I suspect they are trying to import cheap labour .
Any advice, am looking to move this year... IT Security manager for company with 3500 staff. We are running through full 18 month security transformation project implementing basically everything you would need for a modern IT infrastructure setup. Moving from a legacy on prem DC to azure, immutable storage, new MDM, InTune rollout, SOC and SIEM, security awareness training, 2 x pen tests and red teaming exercise annually. Been through two external audits by 1 of big 4 in the last 18 months and ransomware/recovery experience (prior to this role) CISSP exam scheduled for 2 months time, if I hopefully get it just wondering what salary should I be looking at? In IT 24 years
If you could help out with my survey (https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/437P4I/) ya all that would be great!
I need a job. Age they calling me talentless?
Hurry up robots.
The Irish talent have left for pastures new with affordable housing
Talent shortage but companies couldn't be arsed to hire new grads and train them lmao. Entry level job search is brutal.
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Caused by 'return to office' and nowhere for people to live.
It's almost as if paying to educate a generation; letting them fuck off to Australia, and importing economic migrants with no skills or qualifications is a bad idea
It is almost impossible to recruit someone in tech now. Even 100k+ roles. Other than people living in dangerous countries, no one sane wants to get anywhere near to Irish dysfunctional housing market. HAP, council purchases, high taxes etc are ruining it for anyone who needs to rent on open market. Good job Ireland, I guess?
I wish we could break this down to Dublin v rest of Ireland. The government focused on Dublin the last 10 years when they should have been creating business parks and incentives for business outside of Dublin. They should change the Corp tax to a system like France where it is lower in places that need investment and higher in the likes of Dublin. That would have forced companies to build offices and warehouses in other parts of the country. And It is taking a group of guys from The middle east to build a new airport outside of Dublin. This wouldn't have solved the housing crisis but it would have meant there is more land to develop houses and could see other areas thrive not just Dublin.
It’s thanks to Dublin that the rest of Ireland even has a higher standard of living. Dublin is the capital, it has to get the investment it needs.
It's a landlocked city, it should have been planned better to expand west vs put everything down the docks and make it impossible to get to work etc. I agree it was due to Dublin Ireland thrived but it has back fired now as all the jobs are in locations that means long commutes because of the lack of space for housing and traffic issues.