Romanians Become
Latest Tech Rivals
For Off-Shore Jobs

BUCHAREST -- Rent-a-Coder is one of several Internet sites where the world's computer programmers bid to do free-lance software jobs, mostly for American and European companies eager to "off-shore" a small project at low wages. It's no surprise that the nation that's home to most of these eager-for-work programmers is India, now famed in the U.S. for its Bangalore help desks.

But the No. 2 country is, unexpectedly, Romania, despite its small population (23 million) and its history as one of the most insular of all the Eastern-bloc nations.

The high-tech boom in India has been due in part to technology-oriented central planning, along with investment by returning Indian expatriates. Romania has, perversely, communism to thank for its nascent tech scene. The Communists had an engineering and industrialization fetish; all the massive, megalomaniacal construction projects for which the Ceausescu regime was infamous required armies of skilled engineers. Math is still hammered into students, especially the bright ones.

The country also has a long computer history. It was building pirated IBM mainframes back in the 1960s, and PCs of various sorts have been popular for years. Broadband is increasingly common, and Internet cafes are sprouting up, especially near universities.

Now, the Web is allowing a few educated and wired Romanians to live in a very modest prosperity, as is happening in many places in the world.

Programmers such as 28-year old Bucharest resident Catalin Ionescu say the attraction to the work starts, obviously, with the money. They can make as much as $10 or $20 an hour -- many times what an average Romanian earns, although the jobs can be sporadic. Programming is also a haven from the epidemic corruption that is now as suffocating for many Romanians as communism once was.

The money can get them their own small apartment, perhaps a used Dacia -- the national car -- and maybe a short vacation in Greece after a few years.

Typical software projects include helping with a new game or setting up a Web site for small U.S. companies. There is a cruel irony in the fact that Romanian programmers routinely set up one-click e-commerce sites for their Western clients, even while they themselves must contend with an antiquated banking system.

ATMs are everywhere now in Bucharest, but bank wire transfers aren't yet easy. PayPal, the e-mail payment system routinely used by the world's programmers, isn't available in Romania. (Some locals blame the country's reputation as a haven for virus-writers and hackers.)

Rather than a long and risky wait for a check in the mail, many programmers have their money transferred to them via Western Union, for a 7% bite.

The sorts of jobs done by free-lancers tend to be small. But efforts at landing bigger ones are under way here, too.

SoftWin, Romania's biggest high-tech company, with nearly 500 workers, is know for its antivirus work, but lately has been charging into off-shore projects.

The locals' skill with European languages gives Romanians an edge over rivals in India and Russia in attracting help-desk work from European companies.

Softwin ran a help desk for just two European clients in 2000; it has 27 clients now. In countries like France, off-shore work is getting to be as contentious as it is the U.S., and many French companies don't want to be caught in the act. Thus, Softwin tests its Francophone help-desk workers for perfect French; it also instructs them to say they are sitting in downtown Paris.

While every Romanian programmer with a broadband connection has opportunities that were unimaginable just 10 years ago, there is no quick ticket to Easy Street where there is global competition. Most of the programming sites have eBay-like ratings systems, and programmers know they can't get top-drawer jobs without good ratings from previous satisfied customers. So, many will do anything to gain experience. "Whenever the details of a new project get posted, you will see 10 Indians and 10 Russians bidding a dollar, just so they can have a job and get a rating," says Florentin Badea, a programmer.

In truth, a relatively small number of programmers here have high-enough ratings to be picky about jobs. Getting to that stage, says Mr. Ionescu, "is a matter of finding a niche," of having some specialization that an entry-level Indian or Russian programmer doesn't have.

American high-tech workers not long ago believed the same thing, confident that their training would give them a permanent leg up on the rest of the world.

In Romania, they know all about the off-shore controversy in the U.S. The Bucharest programmers I met were surprisingly empathetic about the manner in which their modest recent gains are coming at someone else's expense. Says Ionut Ianasi, a 22-year old Bucharest programmer, "If it were happening to me, I'd be angry too."

Updated November 17, 2003 1:18 a.m.