The programmers are decent and hard working, but nothing spectacular going on. They might not be your first pick when you want innovation. We are mostly self-taught ( thanks DoD for the Internet), and contrast the poor courses that are held at the Romanian universities. There are programmers that range from mediocre to good. Comparing to colleagues from London, or the US, we are not as good. They know more things and are more specialized. They work at a faster pace and work on hard problems. We make decent work though, but nothing mind blowing. If you want guys that can innovate, better look elsewhere like: the US, UK, Finland, Holland and other Nordic countries.
Here is the factual truth about Romania. It is a country of huge contrast. It has really good results in math and compute science Olympiads, but it is at the very bottom at math performance for the population at large. See PISA test results. 40 % of Romanians do not know basic and simple concepts from math. 40 % also are functional illiterates. This is much worse than the US. At the peak level We seem to be very good at IT, yet there is virtually not an algorithm or an innovation that bears a Romanian's name. You learn about Dijkstra, Turing, Fermat and Leibniz, but not Popescu or Iliescu. You hear about how good we are, but no Romanian University is within the top 500 at the computer science section. There is a lot of impostors in our universities and plagiarism is high. The dean of the Technical University of Cluj plagiarized courses from Berkeley and presents them as his own.
Romania has one of the largest internet speed, but only half of the country is connected. And within those that do use it, the vast majority are on Facebook and Youtube. Telekom just published that Romania has the poorest internet usage when it comes to business related activity.
Half of the population still lives in the rural areas, and the conditions are horrible. Over half of Romanian schools do not have running tap water or a decent toilet with flushing water. Mostly are again in the rural areas. But also in the surrounding regions of Cluj, and other major cities, there are entire neighborhoods that do not have access to the sewage network. And they are part of the city of Cluj, not other entities.
Romania is featured as a poor country by World Vision, which needs western support. It is listed among Albania, Georgia and a host of African countries. The orphanage footage of Romania in the 90' comes to mind.
And the list shocking contrast goes on and on.