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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

As the Romanian government I'd be careful... Romania has a well developed IT sector (especially for a developing country) and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code.

I'm also willing to bet that these people as a vast majority weren't voters for the party currently in power.

And the Romanian government is far from having NSA's IT prowess (yes, I know that they botched up quite a few things, but you have to keep in mind that the NSA & US government are playing at an entirely different level than most countries in the world except for maybe China, Russia and 3-4 others). At least on the IT front things the blow back could an order of magnitude bigger than what they're trying to do, clumsily.

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> and they recently pissed off most of the geeks in the country with the new tax code.

Interesting, would you like share some more information on that?

My guess is that something about this got changed (2016):

https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-expands-tax-incentiv...

In November that did change.

Micro-enterprise tax

It is no longer possible for any company to opt for a profit tax payer status (16% profit tax rate applied to its taxable profits) instead of a micro-enterprise tax payer (1% or 3% tax rate applied to its revenue), even if the company has share capital of more than RON 45,000.

It's a new fiscal code that aims to change the way social contributions are payed, but has the side effect of lowering the salaries in the IT sector by about 6%. Many companies are rising salaries to make up for this, but the measure already annoyed a lot of people.

I see. For a minute there I thought this was the catch in Romania's recent impressive economic growth.

The well developed IT sector is mainly due to outside investors. If they leave because of the new tax code and the crusade agaist "multinationals", there won't be a developed IT sector any more.

They'll leave behind plenty of educated IT engineers willing to work though.

Yes, mainly in other countries. If the local IT sector goes bust they won't be able to find any IT jobs locally.

> especially for a developing country

I’m not sure ‘developing country’ is the right term here, however I agree compared to Western European countries, most Eastern European countries aren’t quiet as ‘developed’ (disclaimer: I live in one) which I assume is what you meant to imply. Heck even Western/Eastern is bad, because Finland definitely isn’t in the west of Europe... So is there a better term to describe this type of country?

I'd rather agree it's a correct term. With such a growth of GDP the country is indeed developing: https://www.google.ch/search?q=growth+of+gdp+romania

Romanian here and also a software engineer. It is correct, we are a developing country, except for some cities, where the quality of life is equal to the cities in western europe, but they are a few. Also, the IT sector makes about 6%/7% of Romania's GDP and it has only 150k IT workers where the population is 19 mil (2014) with a rate of ~200k people leaving the country every year since then. I'm still here but don't know for how long tho.

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