[danhanlon]

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

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

[mapleshamrock]

I'd largely disagree. There's a huge amount of R&D and Engineering work being done in Ireland.

On the hardware side Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei, HP, Analog Devices, Xilinx, Nokia Bell Labs and many more all have extensive R&D departments in Ireland.

On the software side, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google etc. all have engineering roles advertised currently on Linkedin.

[danhanlon]

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

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

[nfg]

I can only speak for myself, but I’m in a group of ≈50 working on prime software R&D (as you term it) in a very trendy space in Dublin for a large multinational. I don’t want to say too much beyond that - and you’re probably right that it’s the exception rather than the rule - but it does exist.

[danhanlon]

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