Data Viz: Software Cities of Romania

If we want to keep the doctors home, we have to train more developers.
 

 
Click on the picture or follow the link for the interactive map: http://dascloud.ro/SoftwareCitiesRO2014/
 
One of the secrets to a life with high purchasing power is to earn your money in an expansive place in order to spend it in a place with down to earth prices. But geography limits this approach for most people. You can’t easily earn a New York sallary and pay a Bucharest rent. Not unless on your profile is written coder, developer, or software engineer. Having learnt this trick to have an even bigger purchasing power home than abroad, most of the computer programming graduates from Romania are not leaving to other countries to work. They can be hired by large software companies which are having local development centers to cater all this talent with good cost to quality ratio.
Having bigger payrolls is also good for the cities they work in. They pay more than the average in local taxes and they buy from locals. On the other hand, medical doctors, an indispensable professional category, can’t work from afar and move to UK, France and Germany for a better life, leaving behind the country with the fewest doctors in the European Union. In theory at least, more taxes collected on local budget could increase the medical personal sallary and diminish their need to leave.
Some cities found out already that a developer’s brain is a good for the local community. An export product that doesn’t pollute or devaluate in the near future. They just need to train more developers.
We wanted to know which romanian cities are preparing the most programmers so we looked at every university in the country searching for a curricula that puts the young adults on a software engineer career. We counted 8386 students last year embarking onto computer programming. 20 large cities train zero software engineers and the biggest five (București, Cluj Napoca, Timișoara, Iași and Craiova) train 73% of the the new coding workforce of last year.
Even if the large software companies are working closely with the universities to make the classes more like training courses for the future job, there is no university made by the software industry and most of the students are being prepared by state-owned education institutions.
If you want to move to a different city, look first at how many software engineers are being prepared there and you’ll have a good idea about the city’s future.