Am Romanian, I entered the comment section to say the same thing. More than half my friends and work acquaintances from the last 10-15 years have moved abroad.
My company has opened an office in Bucharest, mainly hiring tech workers. Windows and Unix admins, DBAs, app support but I'm sure other areas as well. I'll be hiring my first employees over there soon. From what I understand, salaries over there in these areas are comparable to elsewhere in Europe as various tech companies have opened offices there as well, but I'm just beginning to learn more about the economy as a whole. Any insights welcome.
I am from Romania. It varies greatly. Some devs are awesome, some less so. I'd say the quality is on par with the German engineers I encountered in my field. Experience shows though, so places that people have had chance to work in a field for longer will be better so I expect expertise will be localized.
The education system pretty much sucks here, IMO, but most good devs got so by being interested in their field. I would say fresh grads as worse than those in other countries.
I find it interesting that the best people tend to cluster together. I live in one of the bigger cities in RO and in my field it seems everyone knows everyone and the most experienced ones tend to hang together.
Just wondering if there is any solution to this. If you incentivise people (financially) to return, you discriminate against the local population. You can try to slow down emigration by building up the economy, but the wage differences are still so large compared to Western Europe that you couldn't stop emigration entirely. It's a tough problem to solve.
