As a city, Dublin faces some big questions from Facebook’s decision to start letting its Irish workforce live abroad.
1. Will other tech companies follow?
2. Does this signal an exodus of tech workers from Dublin?
3. What impact, if any, will this have on rents, house prices and the local economy?
For most people who don’t work in tech, it is the third question that excites most discussion.
On paper, it looks potentially seismic.
If 10pc of Facebook’s 6,000 Irish staff went to live in France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Italy, Poland or the UK, it would have an immediate impact on rents within two miles of the company’s current docklands headquarters.
Now imagine that other tech firms follow suit. If 10pc of Google’s overall Irish workforce (8,000 people) or Microsoft’s (3,000 people) or Amazon’s (1,500) decide to do the same, there might be a hefty chunk of premium demand taken out of the Dublin housing market.
They don’t even have to move out of the country to achieve the same effect — a switch to Waterford or Wicklow or Belmullet would make something of a similar impact on Dublin property prices.
And that’s just the tech sector.
Because companies like Facebook and Google tend to be early actors on workspace and HR policy, the effect could, in theory, be even bigger across other industries.
“I do think what we’re seeing now might be a flavour of things to come,” says Dee Coakley, CEO and co-founder of Boundless, a firm that sets up companies to employ people abroad. Coakley says that demand for her firm’s services started in the tech sector but has now spread to a much wider array of industries.
It’s not just remote working evangelists looking on with interest.
The caricature of rich tech workers bagging the best city apartments and houses is increasingly a grumbling point.
Job announcements from the biggest multinationals are now regularly met with as many groans as there are cheers.
Indeed, scratch the surface in any exchange on the topic and you’ve a good chance of hearing some ugly populist version of: ‘what good are these foreign tech workers to us, anyway, coming over here and driving accommodation costs up with their high paid jobs?”
So is Facebook’s move a nail in the coffin of Dublin’s never ending tech office expansion program?
Will half the tech multinationals become, as one Twitter grump put it, “little more than shell companies grabbing low tax advantages and employing no-one anymore”?
Facebook’s new HR policy may or may not be a dawn for the future of work. It could just be just another Zuckerberg memo that isn’t fully followed through. (There have been a few of those.)
Google, for example, isn’t adopting anything close to as eager a stance on remote working. It foresees no more than a fifth of workers choosing to work from home over the long run. In the meantime, it’s actually applying for planning permission to expand its office footprint — again — in Dublin.
Down in Cork, Apple boss Tim Cook has an even harder line, telling staff they’re all expected back in work in September.
Even in Facebook’s Dublin office itself, there’s a very nuanced interpretation of the Zuckerberg memo outlining the new remote working plans.
Working in another country flatly won’t apply to those in tax, compliance, security, data regulation, finance or most content review activity. That’s a big chunk of what Facebook actually does in Ireland.
But even if these workers could relocate, would they?
I have found that popular views on this question — that Dublin is an expensive kip only of interest because of its tax-avoiding tech employers — are often wide of the mark.
Of those who have actually come to work and live here, how many are really itching to leave?
‘A lot of us coming here from other countries do so to live in Dublin,’ one Facebook employee told me.
This may seem to be a narrative disrupter to those of us who struggle to see much to celebrate in Dublin, which has no metro, no Champions League football and expensive accommodation.
But it’s worth considering, even just for a moment, that Ireland’s capital city may actually be a popular place to live among many tech workers after all.
As I wrote in this column last week, the death of the physical office may also be seriously overegged. Very few of the big tech employers here are letting their office space go. For the biggest of them, it’s the opposite approach, with long term plans in place for expansion.
There’s no question that a significant number of Irish workers now favour the option of ‘hybrid’ or ‘flexible’ working. One Amarach Research survey of 1,200 people last week even claimed that 80pc of us want leeway to work at least some of the time away from the office.
Even if that survey was commissioned by Virgin Media, one of Ireland’s largest broadband companies and a regular advocate of advanced home connectivity, it reflects the aspirations of many people who are imagining their best-case lifestyle scenario after the pandemic.
But as I argued last week, what we think we’d like best may not actually be exactly what works the best in a free market. We’ll all know for sure in a year or two.
For now, Facebook is dipping its toe to see what a world with enhanced geographical choice for employees might look like.
This time next year, some may be logging in from Berlin, Bologna or Biarritz. But I’m betting most will still be commuting from Ballsbridge or Blanch.
