| This is a nice summary of what's going on - to get to the gist of it, Romania has great technical talent, coming out of decent technical schools. What severely lacks in Romania, in my view: a). the business environment; the internal demand isn't enough to support starting and growing business on the local market; building products for external markets from get-go is difficult. This leads to: b). the business talent; the number of big companies (in the sense of growing into an international market) founded in Romania and managed by Romanian business people can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Leading to: c). the product talent; since there is no big demand for products in the local market, there is no way to grow local product designers - the people that can and want to design and build a product just find it easier to emigrate, depleting the already small pool of available talent. All of this leads to companies coming into the country just for technical talent, which is easily employed as outsourcing contractors, and keep the self-perpetuating circle of the tech scene being driven by outsourcing. And this effect is also visible at startup level, where the Romanian-funded startups often have the headquarters, and product designers in US or Canada, and the technical talent in Bucharest or Cluj. I have no idea how to fix this problem, of even if it is a problem in the first place - I feel that as the local economy matures, niches for specific targeted products will appear, facilitating the development of locally-designed products built by local companies. But starting startups based in Romania targeting foreign markets is still an uphill battle versus companies local to those foreign markets. |
Only where you have good managers, good devs, and good designers thinking solely about the people using the product, you'll have a community that gives birth to real software professionals. We're still in the age of Angular v React, Dawn of Outsourcing.