Okay, the rush to India may be over for companies looking to outsource all their tech workers. The new hot spot is... Romania?A new report ...claims that not only is the cost of using and providing IT services in Romania much cheaper than in India, but the country is also home to an abundance of well-educated and highly skilled workers who have a better understanding of Western European culture than their Asian counterparts. Well, I actually have some experience with this phenomenon. The company for which I'm currently contracting laid off almost an entire division of US programmers last year and established a wholly owned subsidiary in Romania. And this group is currrently programming the telecom app on which I'm also working.I also have a friend who is a fairly recent immigrant from Romania. He claims that workers there can live like kings for $6-10K a year. Apparently, that's undercutting even India as a source of cheap programming. So how well do they program, and how is it working out? Well, certainly I can't speak about all Romanian programmers. But the ones we've been using have been, shall we say, less than stellar. An entire section of code had to be taken back and rewritten here. And just two days ago a conference call revealed a huge misunderstanding between the Romanian programmers and their US counterparts (not all of whom are native, BTW) which will result in a significant setback. Of course, none of this matters a whit to the bean-counting execs who see nothing but a bottom line and will be quick to fire US employees when the product invariably fails to go out the door on time.
4:52:20 PM 
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