The pool of developers is large, although not as large as the demand, but the mentality is still one of an employee. Very little UX skills. What to say then about having a far reaching, yet pragmatic vision. Funding also is an issue, but I'd say it's mainly the people, from devs to the way too many 'mentors'.
Regarding the culture of being employed, you should check Germany. Everyone wants to be an employee, lots of benefits. Making a company is extremely hard and capital intensive. A freelancer is chased by all autorities and they make you feel like an outlaw. And so on.
Compared to this, Romania is a littel heaven. Just the corruption and buericracy is holding it back.
You're most probably right, the employee feeling is more broad than Romania.
There are amazing devs here and they don't work for companies like the ones in the article. Most of them are freelancers or working for startups.
Outsourcing companies are screwing people over considering the low overhead of operating. They charge around $80/h or more and pay devs maybe %20 that. The percentage is even worse in the rest of Romania, probably except Bucharest.
Endava and Fortech are both these types of companies, with Fortech offering something like the lowest dev salaries in Cluj. They still have guts to brag about their revenues though.
Spherik Accelerator, mentioned in the article, offer mentorship and aws accounts. That's why they're with their second batch now, and there isn't a single good MVP coming out. Nobody serious would ever apply. The "mentors" there are the same ones involved in every other IT "initiative" (Calin Vaduva, Philipp Kandal, etc.). It's the same people with new outfits and nothing good.
The only good thing in the article is mentioning Moqups, which are doing a great job.
There are other nitpicks with the article like
> We've seen some interesting JavaScript professionals with knowledge of CoffeeScript or AngularJS.
Finding good JavaScript developers here is close to impossible, that's why at some point a company was offering a $2K referral bonus.
> Romanian headquarters of UK IT services company
This is how all Cluj corporates operate. There's no "UK IT services company", it's just a UK PO box or an empty rented space.
Again, there are great devs here, they just don't work with the local companies.