Look, I saw this happen multiple times. People outside of Romania (and even some Romanians) don’t know that this country is actually 2 different ones.
Let’s look at the average. We have a person earning 5000 euros and another one is earning 500. Then we have a 2750 euros average. Now let’s do it at a 1:10 ration. One earns 5000, 10 five hundred. The average is 910 euros. You’d say: Wow, that’s pretty cheap.
But the reality is that you won’t find anybody useful in those 10 people earning less. You must understand that there are 2 different populations in Romania:
- one that you can’t work with, they are educated that always somebody else will cater for you so they don’t have any skill. You ask these people to stand in a place for a second and they’ll answer they didn’t understand the request;
- skilled people that know what the hell is happening, they train themselves, they know foreign languages (some of them even French - crazy, I know) and they know their worth.
This applies to every profession. That’s why you get a 24000 yearly euro average for “senior” developers in Bucharest. Because you have some great developers that are earning north of 40 000 a year, and a group of “senior” developers that you can’t do anything with, earning 500 - 1000 euros per month.
I can assure you, you won’t find anyone capable at low wages. There is a reason why they don’t go into the upper brackets.
And this goes for locations as well. A house in Bucharest/Cluj costs 300.000 - 500.000+ euros. In some remote village you get one for 10.000 euros. Guess in which house you want to live in.