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