I’m a firm believer that Romania has a great tech potential with strong engineering skills, very good tech universities and very good tech infrastructure. While the premises are here, the broader ecosystem (political included and being the main driver) is not helping, though IT is contributing 6% to the Romanian GDP with more than 200,000 engaged people in the ecosystem.

Romania has roughly 24,000 software companies (in comparison Poland has 50,000 software development firms matching this to a population which is double to Romania’s) out of which 20% are product companies but with significantly lower headcount compared to outsourcing companies.

If we’re to mention, Romania is home for UIPath and Bitdefender product companies but also supporting broader international product companies through their delivery centers (outsourcing): Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, EA, SAP, Thales or other smaller players like Stripe.

If we look at the salaries, yes – software engineers are on the top of the pyramid and they’re creating the upper middle class of current Romania. They have the financial means to afford decent housing, child education, cars, holidays … you name it. But the value they produce is just executing good quality code which is envision by product managers or architects from western world.

What if? What if Romania would be sponsoring and supporting local ideas and transforming the way we do software development – more initiation vs execution? Use the brain rather than outsource it for the money? What if we solution our problems and use our local talent pool to solve our challenges? What if we imagine the future digital landscape and use our talent pool to achieve it? What if we partner with local authorities and digitalize the public sector using the generous amazing talent we have? What if … and you can add in here…

I’ve been experimenting the textile outsourcing in the early 90’s first hand (we called it lohn) – my parents have worked their entire life in a textile factory and have become unemployed due to redundancies and offshoring because the Romanian textile industry was not able to re-invent itself.

I don’t want to live the same in today’s IT Romanian industry.