Well, it's hard to freely speak my mind about the Brits w/o getting downvoted, but they created a large problem and let their dogs out on whoever complains about it.
Ireland is solid, especially for any sort of biotech/medical. Strong critical skills immigration path, good wages, pretty much every major company has a facility there (many rivaling the US sites in size), friendly and welcoming place. Housing is a bit of struggle, mainly for renters.
Irish infra is not great if you compare it to many advanced European countries. I hate they still do not have a train/tram connection from the airport to the city. Taxes also make you weep. Not to mention an immense risk of losing all those corp taxes and industry if US pushes ahead and creates barriers for companies to trade. It is great at many things but also has some downsides.
It wasn't terribly difficult, you just have to find a company to hire you. Weirdly the biggest issue I ran into was companies not believing I was willing to relocate and assumed I was just some idiot looking for a remote role. The paragraph about it in my cover letter didn't seem to matter.
Apparently I was initially rejected for that reason, but my boss dug me out of the file for a potential discussion about a US based role. He told me that 6 months later over pints.
Once you've got an offer the critical skills employment permit (CSEP) is quick and painless.
All in all it was basically a lateral move lifestyle-wise. "Federal" income taxes are high-ish, but there isn't another level of state and local taxes eating away more; and property taxes are practically nonexistent (€280/year I think?). There are a handful of schemes which will shield a decent chunk of income from the highest tax rates, and the company benefits are fantastic (medical 100% paid for for my entire family, good bonus, 2:1 "401k" match).
As mentioned, housing is absolutely horrible right now, especially for renters. Luckily home prices are still somewhat reasonable compared to the US - we made enough selling our US home that we could buy an Irish property outright. Can't get a mortgage or any sort of credit until you've been in the country for 6 months. Probably won't stay in this place more than 2 years (when I get permanent residence on the CSEP route) but its a comfortable enough spot to get settled.
I wish it was a bit less car-focused, but there will be a train that drops me off basically at my office door in ~2 years, so they're trying and improving pretty quickly.
No, I'm not rich, I'm just an entrepreneur, so most of my income is from capital gains. And most (almost all) of my expenses is paying salaries and vendors.
> Oh yeah, and just wait until you see you have to pay the US taxes on your income too.
No, you don't.
You still have to file but you get "Federal Tax Credits" for income tax paid abroad and seeing how a EU country's income tax will almost certainly be higher than the US', you'll end up paying nothing.
There's also tax treaties to avoid double taxation in other ways.
I’ve seen plenty of videos covering it from expats stating they still do in fact pay taxes back to the US. Maybe the info is outdated or things have changed recently, but a cursory google makes it seems like that “No, you don’t,” isn’t true. It looks like the Federal Tax Credit only covers up to $130,000 per year of income. Then you pay on whatever you make over that (assuming you don’t have other credits).
> I’ve seen plenty of videos covering it from expats stating they still do in fact pay taxes back to the US.
"Expats" living in Europe?
I ask because "expat" usually refers to someone who moved to a lower cost of living country that may also have significantly lower income tax compared to the EU.
> It looks like the Federal Tax Credit only covers up to $130,000 per year of income.
$130k/yr is absolute bank in Europe.
From a quick Google search, that would put you well in the top 5% of earners in Berlin, just as an example.
So, this shouldn't be much of an issue.
Not a tax advice, but AFAIK, if you had to pay $1000 to US IRS, and already paid $800 to another country, then you owe US $200.
The country must have a tax treaty with US, so they exchange the info about your taxes in background. But many countries in EU has higher tax rates than US, then you owe $0.
From my experience WebSockets are harder at scale. For load balancing you either need sticky sessions or an L7 proxy that can route consistently, and reconnect storms amplify this. Long-lived upgraded connections mean more complexity with rolling deploys, drains, autoscaling, and regional failover. Many managed LBs/proxies have tighter limits/timeouts for WS, so you must tune idle timeouts and ping/pong.
import-maps (supported via "imports" in package.json) improve developer ergonomics, not performance. Node still resolves the mapped path normally; there’s no measurable “boost.”
They’re helpful to replace ugly relative imports, but they don’t change Node’s lookup speed.
Aliases in vite.config.js tell Vite (and its dev server/bundler) how to resolve imports during build and dev time. They don’t make runtime faster because your bundled output already contains resolved paths.
reply