Tech success sweeps Romania
With incentives as abundant as the skilled workforce, software giants are moving in
BUCHAREST — George Mihaiu has boosted his salary fivefold since 2006 and he’s still getting two job offers a day.
Mihaiu, 31, rode a wave of software investment streaming into Romania to increase his after- tax pay to about 2,000 euros ($ 2,790 US) a month, five times the country’s average. In the past 10 years, at least 50 technology companies, including International Business Machines Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp., have set up offices in Romania, making it one of Europe’s biggest technology-worker hubs.
With more than 64,000 certified IT specialists, Romania is the European Union leader in technology workers per capita and sixth in the world, according to Gartner Inc., a research company in Stamford, Conn. Romania’s strengths are its multilingual, educated labour force and its low costs for IT services, Gartner said in a Nov. 6 report.
“Many companies are completely moving their development here,” said Mihaiu, a software developer who chose to work for a smaller company that produces software for U. S. firms because of schedule flexibility. “I personally want to have a balance.” Some friends in Romania earn 4,000 euros a month working 14 to 15 hours a day, he said.
With an education system oriented toward mathematics and foreign languages from primary school through university, Romania is looking to take advantage of a growing European tech- labour shortage.
The continent is facing 500,000 vacancies by 2015, up from the current 300,000, according to Danny Gooris, senior regional manager at Oracle Academy, a unit that provides computer- science curricula and software to schools.
That may offer an exit strategy for the country, where the ruins of factories still dot the landscape as reminders of the forced industrialization during communism, which ended 24 years ago. In cities including Bucharest, Cluj- Napoca and Iasi, steel- and- glass towers have risen in the past decade to house the programmers.
In Oracle’s offices in northern Bucharest, the software maker’s biggest operations and development centre in Europe, Romanian employees speak 27 languages, said Sorin Mindrutescu, unit CEO.
“It’s their innovative spirit that makes Romanians great at this job,” he said from his office in a modern building. “A Romanian immediately thinks of new ways to work around a brick wall when the only textbook solution would be to smash his head against it to break it.”
Romania also is attracting technology entrepreneurs seeking to use the country as a hub for European expansion. Among them is William Sterns, 36, who raised $ 185,000 from his family and friends in New York to set up a business in Bucharest to develop mobile-coupon and mobile- payment systems.
“Part of why we wanted to do it in Romania is because it’s very cheap to get a business off the ground,” Sterns, a professional photographer and the president of Mobuy Solutions, said in Bucharest. “The costs are much less than in other parts of Western Europe and the IT talent is plentiful.”