Romanian Software Developers: 5 Things You Need To Know About Them

How they’re made

Every major city in Romania has at least one prestigious university preparing students for a career in software development or engineering.

Bucharest for example, Romania’s capital, produces gifted software alumni from the University of Bucharest and The Polytechnic University of Bucharest which go on to be recruited “straight of the benches” of the university by renowned companies such as Oracle, IBM, or Ubisoft.

Cluj-Napoca, a smaller city in the heart of Transylvania (also known as the home of count Dracula) throughout recent years has transformed itself into an innovative tech hub. By having 1 out of every 11 inhabitants working in the IT sector and having The Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and the Babes-Bolyai University to generate around 2200 IT&C graduates each year, Cluj-Napoca is truly a mystical place for the tech industry.

Overall, more than 10,000 new software engineers graduate each year in Romania, so the talent pool is pretty big, especially taking into consideration the well known truism about IT engineering school, which is

“Many are accepted, few actually graduate!”.

It’s a tough 4 years streak for those who want to become software developers, as they have to be great at many disciplines that are not solely focused on computer programming, but are more engineering oriented. This implies that an engineer usually has a broader perspective with regards to how stuff works and can comprehend more of the processes that are not related directly to the code itself.

In those 4 years (plus the 2 years of masters for many) the future Romanian software developers develop strong bonds with each other as they live, eat and study together, in many cases even 4–5 students in the same dorm room with limited financial resources. Many of the assignments are group efforts and even those that should be individually handled quickly become a think tank when help is needed. Either by holding in person meetings in the dorm’s study rooms or by using the high speed low priced internet Romania is proud to enjoy, Romanian software students learn that working in functional teams is a fun and effective method of producing great solutions.

There is a need breed of Romanian software developers. People that majored in fields such as journalism, business or psychology have started to jump ship and pickup software development tutorials. The need for personnel is very high in Romania, and in spite of the high number of graduates, the universities alone cannot fill the demand. This lead to the birth of informal software development schools. Either with help from the European Union or with the helping hand of more established enterprises, the informal software development schools provide a rabbit hole experience for those who start seeing the light of tech.

Their thirst for knowledge and innovation

Many of the Romanian software developers whom now enjoy great salaries and lavish benefits, came to the bigger cities to study in dorms that were built in the communist era with substandard living conditions, from usually poor or middle class factory worker families.

Education was a way out, a solution for a better life, and that made for some really motivated students who later became great, dependable professionals.

Coming from those circumstances, like many of the first immigrants in the US or UK, they appreciated the opportunity that they had in front of them and made the best of it. This is why Google employs over 900 Romanians, Facebook 400+ and Microsoft somewhere north of 300+ every year.

Romania is slowly becoming a great place for R&D tasks.The lack of abundant resources leads Romanian thinkers to seek innovative solutions for a wide variety of technical concerns, that other people would have just spent money to resolve. TinTag holds a patent for a long range, bluetooth low energy, custom built antenna, that allows the bluetooth signal to reach around 40 to 60 meters in distance. Instead of just buying a bluetooth circuit, the company invested in the development of an in house solution, which turned out to be more efficient and cost effective than anything available on the market.

Why their English is so good

8 years after the fall of the communist regime when there were about 5 minutes of cartoons on TV per day, Cartoon Network launched in Romania with all of their cartoons being solely in English.

Watching hours of colorful drawings with different characters and circumstances in a foreign language lead to a “connecting the dots” effect for most Romanian children, as from a fairly early age they started understanding the meaning behind the foreign words.

As an addition to this, 95% of the movies that were broadcasted on TV were in English, and to make the learning process even better, they were subtitled. Whatever the character was saying in the movie, you had the translation in real time via text.

It wasn’t long before you knew what they were saying without actually needing to read the subtitles.

Even more so, 90% of the technical resources, forums and learning materials are in English. The first Windows computers to reach Romania were all in English. It’s even weird for most software developers to have an OS translated in Romanian as most of them are used to everything being English.

Thank you Cartoon Netwrok, and thank you lack of internationalization for earlier Windows versions, for providing the scarcity that allowed us to develop English knowledge seamlessly.

So that’s why working with a Romanian software developers is very easy when it comes to communication.

Their impact on the economy

Economists from BNR (The Romanian National Bank) state that the IT&C sector constitutes about 6,2% of Romania’s GDP, being the most dynamic sector of the economy. Good work, software devs!

Romania is the #1 ranking country from Central and East Europe based on the number of IT professionals compared to the total population, with an estimated number of 110,000 professionals (from a population of 19m), over-ranking Poland (they have 100,000 professionals and a population of 38m).

The positive impact on the economy isn’t limited to Romania. According to this ZF article, outsourcing in Romania brings around 25% savings to companies that chose to outsource here, in spite of the rise of the salaries and outstanding benefits that are dedicated solely to the IT sector.

Because Romania makes for a great place for outsourcing, a lot of companies moved their entire development activities here. This lead to the birth of an ever-growing ecosystem that favored the apparition of software startups. BitDefender, Avangate, eMag, or the recent unicorn UiPath are just some examples of Romanian startups that managed to create global impact.

Their work ethic

As you can see, life wasn’t always easy for the Romanian software developer, but that created a work ethic that few can live up to.

It made them resilient and passionate about finding and implementing the best solutions. Using their smarts not only to work hard, but to also work smart, developers from Romania discovered what it meant to work and be Agile pretty much on their own.

While we can’t speak for all Romanian software developers, this pretty much sums up who we @Red Abacus are and how we approach our work with clients from all over the world.

If you’re looking for a team of software developers, we’d love to find out what your needs are and how we can use our skills to make your projects come to life.