Yeah, generally salaries in Romania (any maybe other Eastern European countries) are quoted as net, per month. In the USA/UK it's almost always yearly-based, wi

Yeah, generally salaries in Romania (any maybe other Eastern European countries) are quoted as net, per month. In the USA/UK it's almost always yearly-based, with hourly rates for contractors. In Romania people mainly talk about how much they take home from their salary every month. With regards to the tech talent, I definitely think there is some truth to that. I'm no expert, but I'd say it might have something to do with the education system, or maybe even culture, which is quite heavily focused on maths and physics. With that said, we always rank quite low on most international education indices and the like. I think it might be some sort of educational inequality where children in the cities get quite good education and are pushed by their parents to study, while the ones in rural areas get the short end of the stick. Also, something that really pisses me off is how many Romanians overstate our IT prowess. "Romanian is the second language spoken at Microsoft" is now part of folk wisdom, despite being proved to be false and just a media hoax in the '00s. We have many big companies with offices in Bucharest (and other cities), but they aren't really flocking to get all of this "enormous talent" just laying around. Don't get me wrong, we do have many reputable engineers and university professors, but nothing that would warrant this common perception about how incredibly skilled Romanians are in IT.