As most people who live there, you have an insider's perspective and you tend to overestimate how other places are doing.
Cluj and Bucharest are islands in that country, in terms of economic growth.
The biggest strength of the IT sector in Cluj is its drive and motivation. These things take time but there is no reason to deny that there is potential.
Comparing such a small city like Cluj to London and cities in the US is not very fair.
You can certainly find very talented people in Cluj who could work on startups, however this is clearly not the majority. Like everywhere.
I am a C++ developer working on applications for Embedded Linux devices. I specialize mainly on the Qt framework. I am looking to relocate to the aforementioned countries and work on challenging projects. I also have a java web background and fairly solid knowledge of javascript and html5. In my free-time I work on my open source projects and I am currently learning low level system programming (linux syscalls, kernel modules). I am curious about new technologies (rust, julia, etc) and I also have an interest for functional programming.
C++ Developer working on applications for various ARM devices, looking to move to Norway or Sweden. Also did webdevelopment in the past: java (spring), angular, jquery. I specialise on Qt, but I'm open to any modern C++ based project.
https://github.com/boglarkasebestyen/dvdscreensaver