samsonr

Did you take a look at https://coderwall.com/ ?

Greetings from Romania too. I'm 24 and I've been actively working as a programmer for the past ~3 years. I have graduated from ASE - Cybernetics (Bucharest) at the age of 22 and been working in the area since then. Despite the fact that I felt college wasn't teaching me so much as the real world, it surely shaped me and changed my view of things. The biggest gain for me probably was that college showed me how little do I know about programming in general and motivated me to keep learning every day.

While the college level is arguably lower than other parts of the world, you'll still get the chance to interact with smarter people and that can only help.

I've also had the chance to work with people without a CS degree (people around my age) and I think they are finding it harder to learn new concepts without a proper (academic) foundation.

Go for it, you will not regret the choice.

Isn't this tight coupling the issue with node js?

As a Romanian web developer working remotely for a Western company active in the adult industry and collaborating with video-chat studios in my hometown (Bucharest), I'd like to add my 2 cents:

I'm actually in touch with the studio managers here and I can tell you everything happens 'by the book', we are not a 3rd world country. The girls are not enslaved, abused or forced into anything, instead they are recruited through the usual recruiting methods (media), they even work legally and get their pay-checks in time. They can quit whenever they want, all of this happening in complete discretion. You probably know that the websites they work on are blocked within the same country for obvious reasons. Of course the morality of the girls may come into question, but that is strictly up to them. They are just taking advantage of the economical discrepancy between eastern and western Europe (average monthly wage here is around 400 EUR). Yes, there are people spending massive amounts of money on video-chat and things can degenerate quickly (affecting your private life) but same thing happens with gambling sites and no one bats an eye.

As for working within such a company I could never say that I became numb or feeling morally wrong. I've had the opportunity to work with quality people on challenging technical issues and it has been a prolific period for my career. The way I see it is as being strictly business.

As for Romania, it really is a good place for startups. There are a lot of competent people here wasting their value and time on jobs and wages that some of you would consider ridiculous. But that's just what history left us with and it may take a while for us to get in line.