With 6,000-7,000 graduates of IT faculties per year, only half of whom are employable, the workforce that comes out every year doesn’t cover the market’s needs.
“We have to do everything we can to encourage the creation of full-range software companies, which develop products. Not software companies of the kind currently present in the Romanian industry, which make software based on orders from foreign companies,” says Andrei Pitis, who has been the manager of the association since February this year. He has 20 years’ experience in software and technology, and his latest position was as manager of Ixia, where he was in charge of 200 people.
“We are out of programmers. The software industry grows by the number of yearly faculty graduates at the most.”
Bitdefender, Totalsoft and Siveco are, according to Pitis, relevant examples of firms that created software products generating jobs for people with expertise in other sectors than IT.
“A firm that creates a software product with 10-20 people sells it with another 20 people a million times. And it will still have something to sell because those programmers will stay in the company and create new, improved versions of the product.”
Pitis says the fundamental change is that some people who now come to this faculty perceive IT as a sector that pays very well and are not necessarily very passionate about it.
“Another reason why companies don’t see an increase in student quality could be the fact that 10% of graduates go directly to Google and Facebook.”
Another trend among software companies, which also manifests itself at European level, is to recruit exclusively senior programmers, with a few years’ experience, who have already been tested.
“US software and technology firms gain precisely by taking the risk of picking talents from among the undergraduates. It’s hard to get a talented senior from another company because employers seek to keep them with very good retention policies.”
Pitis says the authorities should remove the notion that Romania has a qualified and cheap workforce from its pitch to IT investors, because neither does Romania have programmers available on the market, nor are the existing ones cheap.
“It was a good pitch for the beginning, when this law for exempting programmers from tax was passed, but now the jobs have been filled. The question is though: what can you do to get more from the people you have? Instead of having 100,000 jobs, you have 200,000 because you create well-paid jobs in other departments.”
A junior software developer earns between EUR700 and EUR1,000 net per month, while one with a few years’ experience earns between EUR1,500 and EUR1,800 net per month and a senior can earn EUR2,000 and EUR2,500 monthly, 5 to 7 times more than the average wage in the economy.
IT is the only sector of the economy that has seen a significant rise in the past few years both in terms of the number of employees and in terms of the average wages in the sector, compared with other sectors of the economy. Salaries of IT sector employees rose 61% in the past five years, according to data reported by the National Statistics Institute, while the average net wage rose 21% in the same period.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)