In the next few lines, I will share my personal experience of moving from Barcelona to Dublin while working as a developer. It has been a very interesting experience with more than a few challenges, and finally, almost 2 years later, I’m ready to share my experience.
Everything started as all big changes do, with a mix of excitement, fear, and a lot of planning. It was a very planned decision, as my wife and I had spent countless hours talking about leaving Spain to try a different country. We knew that our future country needed to be in Europe, as none of us wanted to be too far from our family, and we knew that we wanted to live in a country where their main language was English. That left only two potential options: the UK and Ireland.
Before Brexit, we both liked the idea of moving to Scotland, as we’ve been there on vacation a few times, and we really liked the lifestyle and people, and my wife was especially in love with Edinburgh. However, Brexit changed everything. As you may know, after Brexit, you need to get a visa to stay in the UK. Besides, the COVID situation was pretty recent (it was 2022), so we felt like trying to move to the UK was too risky for us. The only option left was Ireland.
I knew that Ireland had the headquarters of the biggest tech companies in the world, such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and many more, so for me, Ireland was an option that really excited me from a career point of view. There was only one tiny problem. I had never visited the country, and apart from knowing that it could be good for my career, I had no idea about it. My wife, on the contrary, had visited Ireland on one occasion, and she really liked the lifestyle and the culture, as it’s relatively similar to Scotland, with green landmarks, a lot of castles and monuments, and a lot of nature around, which is something that we both value a lot.
After investigating the country from very different points of view (economics, politics, culture, history, cost of living, salaries, work market, etc.), I found it pretty appealing, especially since we were living in Spain, which was facing economic problems, and the work market was pretty slow with a huge unemployment rate (it still has one of the higher unemployment rates in Europe).
Ireland was not perfect, though. After some investigation, I found that Ireland was facing a severe housing crisis, and the cost of living has been skyrocketing since the start of the war in Ukraine. I was not scared, though, as Spain was facing the same issues, and to be fair, I think most of the problems that I found online were the same in most parts of Europe.
So, once the decision about the country was made, there was a tiny, small detail to solve. We only wanted to move to Ireland once I found a job while still living in Spain, as we thought it would be too risky to leave our stable jobs in Spain to live in a different country without having a job or having any contact that could help us in case things didn’t go as planned as they usually do.
Looking for a job in Ireland from Spain
First of all, I would like to share a little bit about my background. In 2022, I had a little more than 5 years of experience, and I was working in Spain for an online travel agency called Atrapalo as a senior frontend developer, working with technologies such as Next.js, React, and Typescript and following clean architectures such as domain-driven design. In summary, I like to think that I have a really good CV, as I’ve always tried to work for companies that make me grow in my career and offer me opportunities to learn the latest technologies.
With that in mind, I started translating all my LinkedIn and CVs from Spanish to English, and I started applying to different job positions.
I also started speaking in English with my wife daily to practice, as I was not 100% fluent, especially when speaking. By then, my English was good enough to read (a few months prior to making the final decision to move, I started reading books only in English), and I was able to understand 80% of a conversation, but when I tried to speak, I felt really awkward, and I got extremely nervous. After a month of speaking daily and exclusively in English with my wife, I improved enough to feel relatively comfortable having phone interviews without choking.
After a month of sending CV’s and having some phone interviews with recruiters, I reached the final stage with 2 companies. I got an offer from one of them, which I decided to accept. The offer was good enough, but in the lower range for someone with my skillset. And there was no relocation package and no fancy perks. However, for me, the most important part was the opportunity that this job offered me. We were moving to Ireland.
Preparing to move to Ireland
When I received the offer, I told the company that I needed six weeks to be ready. Two of these weeks were to finish the relationship with my current employer (as it’s common in Spain), two weeks to make the proper arrangements to move, and 2 weeks to establish ourselves in Ireland.
This seems like enough time, but there was so much that needed to be done. First of all, we tried to sell all the things that were worth selling. We gifted or threw away the rest. We also got our passports in place (it’s not really needed because we were moving inside Europe, but it’s always a good idea to have the passports ready just in case). We also started looking for temporary accommodation in Ireland, as it was impossible to rent anything while living in Spain due to the housing crisis and the fact that we had a Spanish phone number, and for some reason, maybe because of the high demand, no landlord was willing to call us back, so we finally ended up renting for 3 weeks an apartment in the centre of Dublin, as my position was fully remote within Ireland and we wanted to be close to the public transport, and it’s always easy to move around if you’re in a city.
The last few days, apart from doing the usual preparations, we decided to spend as much time as possible with family and friends, and in no time it was the night prior to our flight to Ireland.
The first few weeks in Ireland
As soon as we reached the Dublin airport, my wife and I had one and only one obsession: to find long-term accommodation in Dublin. We did our investigation online, and it was really hard to find any place to rent in the city, and we only had the booking for 3 weeks, so the clock was ticking.
We got some prepaid Irish phone numbers, and we started applying to every accommodation that was published on several online portals. We had notifications active, and every time we got one, we stopped doing whatever we were doing at the moment to send an application.
The only two requisites that were non-negotiable for us were that it needed to have two rooms (one to sleep in and another so I could work), and we didn’t want to share the place with other people. It was one of the most stressful moments of my life.
During these few days, we also tried to open a bank account in Ireland because it’s always easy to do some paperwork if you have a local bank account, and also because my new employer asked me for a bank account with an Irish IBAN. However, for some reason, it was impossible to open a bank account without permanent residency. There was some workaround that we tried with an online bank account (nowadays Revolut offers an Irish IBAN), but in the end it didn’t work for us, and my employer offered me to use Wise instead of a conventional bank.
After a week in Dublin, we had the opportunity to visit a few apartments, but we were not selected by the landlords, or it was not what we were expecting from the place. It’s impressive what some state agents can do with nice lighting and Photoshop.
We were pretty anxious by then, but some evening we received a call from the state agent that managed the first house that we went to see in Dublin (a nice and small 2-bed terrace house from the 70’s) saying that the landlady was offering to rent the house to us. It was quite expensive, in the upper bracket of our budget, but we decided to accept it as it had been hell to find anything that fit our expectations and was in living conditions.
A week later, still living in the temporary apartment, I started my new position as a senior frontend developer, and two weeks later we moved to our new home.
Working as a developer in a different country
As I mentioned before, I worked fully remotely in my new position. This was not new for me because, even before the pandemic, I used to work hybrid, going to the office only 2 days per week, and after the pandemic, I had plenty of time to get used to working from home most of the time.
One of the biggest differences that I discovered about my colleagues is that everyone is really polite with each other. It's not that in Spain people are rude or anything like that, but Spanish as a language is more direct, and it’s common to use commanding sentences. In Ireland, however, people are more polite and use more indirect ways of asking for things. That’s something that I eventually got used to, but in the beginning, it took me some time to start talking this way.
Another difference that I noticed was that people respect the working hours, and except on exceptional occasions, I was never asked to work overtime. On the contrary, in Spain, it is pretty common to work as a developer for nine or even ten hours per day, depending on the company. And no, in case you’re asking yourself about it, nobody pays you for the overtime hours.
Other than that, the kind of job and the project that I worked on were pretty similar to my previous experiences. The main difference was that in Ireland we had less stress in general and the timing was more realistic, but that could perfectly be because I got lucky with the companies that I’ve been working for so far.
Being in emergency tax and getting the PPSN
Something to consider when moving to Ireland is that to be able to pay taxes, you need to have a PPS number. And when you first arrive in the country, you obviously don’t have one. You cannot require one without employment and permanent residency in Ireland.
If you don’t have this number, you will be subject to the emergency tax. This basically means they are going to tax all your salary at 40%, which is the maximum rate. There is no way to prevent this from happening, so in the first few months that it takes to request the PPS number, you will only get a little more than half of your salary. After that, you can request to get your money back, and I must say that the revenue is really fast, giving you back what is yours.
Weather
Some people imagine Ireland as this grey country, always rainy and windy. And they are not wrong; there is some truth in that. It rains a lot, but I must say that we don’t experience heavy rain too frequently; most of the time, it is very light rain. To be honest, I really like the humid days when there is a very subtle rain outside and I’m working, warm, and cosy at home. The summer is mild, and the days are longer and way sunnier, which I really appreciate compared to Spain, where the summer is like living in hell at 35 degrees Celsius.
However, during winter we don’t have much sunlight, and I take vitamin D supplements as I used to be a little bit low on morale, which never happened to me before living in Spain.
In general, I like the weather here, but it’s a very personal thing, and I know that there are a lot of people, especially those living in warm countries, who find it really difficult to live in Ireland because of the weather.
Final Thoughts
Almost two years later, we are still living in the same 2-bed terrace house. I’m working for a different employer for almost double my initial salary in Ireland, and we are about to buy a house in the country. So much has happened since then, but everything started with the desire to improve in life and not be complacent in our comfort zone. I have not regretted it even once.
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