The pragmatism of a tacit industry

While the obstinately recurring economic reports seem caught between companies drowned in debt and galloping inflation, some young people, Romanians, who have seamlessly merged into the world economy, are finding ways to elude the exasperating bureaucracy and are making handsome money on their one most valuable resource: their own brains.

They never complain – perhaps just over a beer – of being born in the “wrong country,” they never show off how much they work. They have found their own way of professional and business success, one based on pragmatism. Silent workers.

These young Romanian programmers work in the most fascinating industry of all: the Internet, the new economy, information technology, whatever you want to call it.

They saw in the Internet a way to find international recognition of their skills. IT managers could not care less about their grades, their doctor’s degree, obtained with some pompously academic paper. What they care about is down-to-earth skills. So programmers can pass their test online and immediately afterwards be plugged into the international software industry.

It is already common knowledge that information technology specialists are the most sought-after commodity on the world market and many young Romanians choose to emigrate into a country where a home and a decent salary is available immediately upon employment, not to mention plenty of prospects for the future.

Occasionally, Romania’s leaders organise some embarrassed get-together, something like a festive symposium on “how to bring back our young from better countries” – whom, after all, the country has trained and must have. On such occasions, pragmatic subjects are carefully avoided.

Few wonder how we could make Internet access or computers more affordable, or how to open the gates of computer training to children, so we don’t end up a few years later with another generation of semi-illiterate people or literate people who have no relation to the economy of the world they will have to live in. But that’s a different story.

Since two or three years ago, leaked programmers are beginning to come back, not because of some heart-breaking plea, but because they saw a business opportunity. They open their own software firms or set up foreign company branches, they are sent here to return with that pinnacle of mathematics which is software.

An industry insider once said you can send an e-mail in Romanian to any computer powerhouse worldwide, and the answer will promptly come, also in Romanian, proof that at least one of our nationals is a top-level employee.

People investing in Romanian software companies are attracted by the workforce – or better yet, “brain force” – which is cheaper than in developed countries but just as skilled. On the other hand, Romanian employees get paid more than usually on the Romanian market.

Of course, this is not a phenomenon just yet. But the strength behind these developments resembles the sturdiness of plants breaking through asphalt, out into the daylight and air. Official software exports from Romania are not larger than those of forest mushrooms.

As departed software specialists return to hire other programmers who would have otherwise left, one thing is clear: the much heralded globalisation is drifting over Romania, too, not necessarily because of government programmes, but first of all because of the young, who are better at gauging the direction in which the world is moving.

These people are connected every day, via their computers, to the world economy, and this makes them pragmatic and always on guard. Most of the time they work for the universe beyond Romania’s borders and send the final product via e-mail, to clients they never get to see.

One IT expert said it was impossible to estimate how much money was entering Romania on software exports because many individuals work on their own via e-mail and cannot be identified.

Here is an unseen working category, perhaps the most efficient in the whole Romanian economy – the most heartening one, anyway.