In EU the share of ICT workers is pretty much homogeneous among the different countries.
It's their salary that varies a lot (but not as wildly as in the US)
It's much easier to get a decent wage for a Romanian in Italy than for a Romanian tech worker in Romania
It's the reason why a lot of Italians go to live abroad as well.
Italy has a population of ~58m but an ICT service population of ~500k [0].
Romania has a population of 19m but an ICT service population of ~200k [1]
And this masks the large Romanian tech diaspora in Germany, the UK, and ofc a portion in Italy.
So the question is, why are so few Italians work in tech in comparison to a much poorer country?
> It's much easier to get a decent wage for a Romanian in Italy than for a Romanian tech worker in Romania
Just using levels.fyi (which imo is skewed) Romanian dev salaries are higher [2] than Italian ones [3] and as a former hiring manager for one of those MNCs Europeans keep trying to apply to, I can attest that salaries for the 50th percentile and above are comparable across Europe, which ofc means CEE based tech employees end up having less of an incentive to move out West (excluding UK and Switzerland) when factoring CoL.
There's a reason Big Tech employers like Amazon have a major developer presence in Tier 2 Romanian cities like Cluj or Iasi and not Tier 1 Italian cities like Milan or Rome.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/419569/number-of-employe...
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/419587/number-of-employe...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania
[3] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy
> Romania has a population of 19m but an ICT service population of ~200k [1]
Yeah and in Italy around ~9% of the population was not born in Italy (mostly coming from non EU/ poorer countries with no tech skill whatsoever, not a judgement, just a fact) while in Romania is basically 0%
So, as I've said, ICT workers are pretty much 10% everywhere in EU
You're putting your biases in your stats. We're also not taking into account many other factors such as the type of jobs we are referring to
Many countries have lots of tech workers doing mechanical turk kind of work (not saying it's true for Romania, just a data point that is missing here)
Moreover, hiring managers of course prefer to pay less than to pay more in absolute, regardless of the buying power
If I had to live with a Romanian salary in Italy, I would be in the lower tier while now I am in the top 10%, but of course tech workers have better salaries on average everywhere in Europe,so they are less incentivized to move especially coming from poorer countries, where their more than average salary would immediately become normal or less than average abroad. To get a better salary in Europe I should move to Netherlands or Ireland and work for some US Company. Not even UK is competitive in my case, all things considered, including the lifestyle I am used to.
Last, but not least. Amazon employes ~20 thousand people in Italy and of course has a strong presence in Milan (I worked for them in Milan) while it's only about 3.5k in Romania.
