
Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs - fern12
http://www.hiringlab.org/2017/07/25/next-silicon-valley/
======
ynniv
I get that you work with what you have (in this case, a corpus of job
postings), but a ranking that places Baltimore in the top three tech hubs
fails the sniff test. CBRE has a better list here (email registration wall):
[https://www.cbre.com/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-
Talen...](https://www.cbre.com/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-Talent-2017)

I'm biased in that it places Atlanta unusually high, but overall it is a
better, less surprising ranking:

    
    
      Bay Area
      Seattle
      New York
      Washington DC
      Atlanta
      Toronto
      Raleigh
      Austin
      Boston

~~~
echelon
Atlanta is amazing. It has an extremely low cost of living, yet there are tech
companies here paying SF wages.

Anecdotally, my rent is $1300/mo for a 900 sqft loft directly on Atlanta's
Beltline [1], and my total comp is (edit: decided to remove this since I might
get doxed. I'll be happy to talk with anyone seriously considering Atlanta via
email).

It's also been really interesting to see Georgia rocket to the #2 location in
the US for filmmaking (a personal hobby of mine). The folks I know in the
industry say we're poised to overtake LA eventually.

I mention this because Atlanta has a great mix of culture from a variety of
different backgrounds. The music and arts scenes are particularly strong.

[1] [https://beltline.org](https://beltline.org)

~~~
logfromblammo
I really want to like Atlanta, but the whole city makes my skin crawl.

Whenever we go there, usually to take in an MLB game, I just want to turn
around and leave immediately. There doesn't seem to be any rational reason for
it. When the spouse drives out of town to go stalk Walking Dead filming
locations, the overwhelming sense of dread eases up, and I just get bored
looking at bits of rural Georgia that were lucky enough to appear on
television for one scene.

Maybe I'm allergic to peachtree streets.

In contrast, NYC, Chicago, Boston, Phoenix, Nashville, San Diego, Denver,
Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and most other US cities I have visited just don't
have an aura to them that I can pick up. Baltimore felt like I just walked in
on someone who had been crying and was trying to hide it. Washington, DC, felt
like someone was following me the whole time, like being hunted. Cincinnati
felt great just being around it; it made me want to consider moving there.

Atlanta is just the opposite of that, every time I go. Just being there
stresses me out for no readily apparent reason.

On paper, it seems like it should be great. Georgia Tech is close, and the
local economy is great. All kinds of television shows and movies have that
juicy Georgia peach at the end of the credits now, instead of Vancouver. The
weather is decent for 10 months out of the year. Lots of local agriculture.
Lots of roads leading out of town, and a hub airport for a relatively decent
airline. Diverse, cosmopolitan culture, as long as you stay in the city limits
and away from the suburbs. About the only thing it lacks entirely is a
seaport. I just can't stand actually _being there_.

~~~
addicted
Lived in Atlanta. Glad to get out. I don't think I've disliked any city as
much as I did Atlanta, and I have no idea why.

------
jkw
Breaking out SF from "Silicon Valley" seems like an outdated approach to
segment the data. I would say for the past decade, "Silicon Valley" includes
SF, Peninsula through San Jose for all intents and purposes. I see people, who
live in SF, commute down to Peninsula and vice versa. The job market in the
Bay Area is all pretty fluid.

~~~
mevile
I find it interesting to see the difference. I moved from San Jose to work in
the city 8 years ago and to me, anecdotally, it's always felt like that was a
trend, startups were coming to SF and so was the talent and that "silicon
valley" was the tech hub 10-15 years ago. So seeing real data that's showing
what's actually happening is very interesting to me. I'd like to see more
break downs of south bay vs SF/Oakland tech jobs and startup growth.

------
zw123456
Reasons for Seattle: 1) take a long shower 2) wash your car 3) water your lawn
4) cheap electrical rates 5) enjoy the outdoors 6) awesome IPA's 7) pot is
legal 8) great culture 9) moderate weather as global warming progresses

downside - traffic is horrible.

That is my take as a long time Seattlite.

~~~
0xbear
Also: no income tax. If it's introduced, people will leave in massive droves,
because as nice as those things are, 6 months of rain every year is not
everyone's cup of tea

~~~
gpawl
[http://www.npr.org/2017/07/17/537645901/legal-challenges-
exp...](http://www.npr.org/2017/07/17/537645901/legal-challenges-expected-as-
seattle-approves-income-tax-on-high-earners)

Seattle is very progressive, and highly in favor of income tax.

~~~
0xbear
Nah. Seattle is really faux progressive, thankfully. Two of the world's
richest people peacefully coexist with a massive (and growing) population of
homeless people, and all those Hillary-votin' rich yuppies will run away the
moment they're forced to put their money where their mouth is. 2.25% tax in
Seattle itself is already being contested. And state income tax is not really
possible as it requires two thirds majority.

~~~
icelancer
State income tax will also be met with the largest employers here expanding to
other municipalities and states that play by their favorable rules. I worked
at one of the tech giants in management consulting and they have had
contingency plans to ship stuff to Austin the minute taxation became more of a
burden on income.

------
Benjammer
They looked at tech job listings as a percentage of ALL job listings in cities
with a population over 1 million. How does that show a "tech hub"?

I would bet NYC has more total tech jobs (as well as open listings) than a lot
of the "tech hubs" on the list.

~~~
tmaly
I was just wondering why NYC was not on that list. Baltimore is very close to
DC, is it really two different regions?

~~~
vkjv
Not really. They are close. There are places you can live that are a
reasonable commute to both. Also, I know people that make the commute in both
directions. MARC train helps.

Source: I live and work in Baltimore.

~~~
gph
And really it's hard to determine what differentiates the data between DC and
Baltimore for a lot of tech jobs. The ranking calls it Baltimore-Columbia-
Towson, so that probably means Fort Meade and a lot of other tech jobs that
might be more 'in-between'.

------
jeremynixon
I don't understand why Indeed breaks up San Jose / Sunnyvale / Santa Clara and
San Francisco / Oakland / Hayward, and also fails to include Palo Alto,
Mountain View, Menlo Park, Cupertino, etc. It completely distorts the
proportion of fast growing jobs that are in these 8 tech hubs.

~~~
sqs
The reason is that they broke it down by MSA:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas).
Palo Alto and nearby cities are in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara MSA.

~~~
jeremynixon
Ah, thank you.

When they go on to infer that fast growing jobs come out of the hubs, their
adherence to that standard distorts the numbers downwards. Reader beware.

------
bit_logic
Disappointed Los Angeles didn't make the list but not surprising. LA has all
the right things like colleges (UCLA USC Caltech and others) and same CA
employment laws as Silicon Valley. It has big companies like Snapchat but just
can't seem to cross that threshold into major tech hub. Maybe Hollywood is
just too dominant here, similar to how NYC isn't on the list because finance
dominates there.

~~~
dizzystar
When I lived in Los Angeles, a significant amount of tech jobs I applied /
interviewed for where in the industry. It's possible they are over-looking all
the major studios (Sony, NBC, etc), along with the very large support for
gaming and movies. Data pipeline, meta data management, and streaming are just
a few things that are popular out there.

I think the difference is that many companies in LA are smaller and
independent, but I caution that anyone who thinks that Hollywood is more than
a small fraction of Los Angeles work hasn't explored much of the city.
E-commerce and random website dev is also a much larger market than any town
I've seen.

Another problem is the shear size of the city and the accompanying suburbs.
You have tech in Pasadena, Burbank, Santa Monica, Torrence, etc, and no sane
person would make these cross-town drives every day. I don't think that many
people who live in LA even realize how large the place is, and possibly
wouldn't realize that many "cities" aren't cities at all, but a part of LA.

In my observation, there is more tech work in LA than Austin, but I digress.

~~~
sjg007
Video games traditionally (Electronic Arts, Westwood Studios -> Blizzard). You
have Symantec and now Google and Snapchat. The Adsense guys were in LA as
well. Doubleclick was in Pasadena. Match.com, Tinder, Grindr, and a few others
around. So there is a mixture of things. Santa Barbara has some tech as well.
I think UCLA needs to foster more of a tech transfer mentality. Stanford profs
go and develop tech companies. UCLA ones do not to the same extent (or if they
do they leave UCLA). I could be wrong about that but that's how I see it. I
think Stanford has a better deal on student housing as well vs UCLA, but I
could be wrong. UCLA has 44k students vs Stanford at 16k. Travis Kalanick came
out of UCLA and has a story about raising a term sheet back in the day for a
previous company that was written like a movie term sheet (aka really bad). So
that may have something to do with it as well. But I think it is changing. The
Bay area is bursting at the seams so you will see the market evolve.

------
vancan1ty
Whatever happened to telecommuting eventually making it relatively unimportant
where you live? Will this happen in the forseeable future, or will the best
tech jobs continue in this trend of centralizing around major hubs?

~~~
rpazyaquian
Telecommuting/remote/WFH opportunities are as rare as ever. Companies are
shying away from it as they begin blaming it for productivity issues that are
the fault of completely different problems, e.g. bad management and culture. I
don't foresee remote/WFH taking off any time soon.

~~~
Consultant32452
Nah, they're hiring remote workers like crazy. They're just working _very_
remotely: India.

------
Nokinside
This is not US only phenomenon. Agglomeration externalities create large
productivity differences and it seems that they are constantly being
underestimated.

Cities have higher productivity than other areas and larger cities have much
higher productivity than smaller cities (in the developing world). Cities are
like brains where bigger city thinks qualitatively better.

Housing constraints in larger cities put limits to the aggregate growth.
Recent paper: "Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation, Hsieh and
Moretti."
[http://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/growth.pdf](http://eml.berkeley.edu//~moretti/growth.pdf)

>We quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor across US cities and
its aggregate costs. Misallocation arises because high productivity cities
like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent
restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers
who have access to such high productivity. Using a spatial equilibrium model
and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered
aggregate US growth by more than 50% from 1964 to 2009.

~~~
cloop_floop
Cities are cool to think about for that reason. They're formed because it's
more efficient logistically for all these economic actors to come together.
However, they're unpleasant (in some ways, but not others) to live in because
of side effects of the same processes: concentrated noise, pollution, etc.

------
paul6987
DC and Baltimore is the land of govt contracting where designers and
developers can command hourly rates of 60 to 100 an hour based on skill-set.
There's tons of demand too and the cost of living is fairly inexpensive.

I just left my high paying govt contract job as I tried working things out
with a co-worker who suddenly became a real S#$t to work with .. tried one on
one with him & then with management. Overall nothing changed after months so I
left and will be starting a better paying job in 2 weeks. There's too much
demand to sit and take crap from anyone.

------
40acres
Can anyone speak to.the job market in the DC metro? I've been thinking a lot
about moving back to the east coast and DC seems like a decent trade off
between cost of living and interesting jobs (compared to my home NYC).

What kind of jobs are in DC, what's the salary range like?

~~~
bakenator
The majority of jobs in DC metro are government contracting as you would
imagine. That is not to say there are not interesting opportunities available.
A few startups and many small contracting shops filling niche spots for the
Gov.

IMO the cost of living in not good in DC metro. Very high home prices, only
below SF, Boston, NYC. Lower salaries than SF/NYC across the board. Upper
middle class in DC requires 200k income, many families here with two 100k
earning parents.

~~~
Bahamut
It should be noted that most people don’t live in DC proper - most commute in
from the suburbs. My friends in the area all bought houses in places like
Fairfax, Springfield, and between Baltimore and DC. House prices are not
cheap, but I’ve heard $600k for a nice house quoted to me.

DC proper is just ridiculous. Thankfully you can find more reasonable places
just across the river with a short commute time.

~~~
sndean
And the price difference is similar for apartments. I'm paying $1000 for a
~1000 sqft apartment on the cheap side of the bridge. I have a coworker paying
$2500 for a smaller place in DC. The difference in commute time is 5 minutes.

------
rpazyaquian
Boston doesn't seem to be doing very well in the long-term. I moved here to
take advantage of both the presence of tech jobs, and to live in an accepting,
progressive blue state. If I want to stay in the area, what field should I be
transitioning into?

I know the Boston area has a lot of medical/health companies around, and it
might be worth it to start looking at those kinds of companies as a long-term
solution. Are they still a good choice for MA tech jobs?

~~~
shados
The Boston area has quite a bit of tech jobs and pays pretty well, with the
main issues being that everything is falling apart and people are crazy.

~~~
rpazyaquian
Sounds like SNAFU to me.

------
Ologn
Baltimore and Raleigh are tech hubs, and New York is not?

In 2000 when the dot-com's went bust, things were not so bad for IT in New
York because the other industries were still going along - media, advertising,
fashion, and of course, finance. San Francisco has all its eggs in one basket.

Plus New York has Stack Overflow, Spotify, Computer Associates, IBM, Seamless,
Rockstar Games, Kickstarter and companies like that as well.

~~~
randcraw
The problem with this article is its focus on the _fraction_ of a city's total
jobs that are high tech, not the _number_ of high tech jobs.

Raleigh's total market is small compared to NYC's, of course (~2 million in
2013). Even then I can't believe a high fraction of work in the Research
Triangle area is tech related. Aside from the 3 universities, it just doesn't
have many significant tech employers these days. It's been decades since
anyone mentioned tech business in RTP in the same breath as other hubs in the
vicinity like DC, Charlotte, Atlanta, or Houston.

~~~
mej10
Red Hat, IBM, Fidelity Investments, Cisco, NetApp, SAS, Citrix/Sharefile,
Quintiles.

They all employ thousands or close to it in RTP/Raleigh. These are just the
ones I thought of off the top of my head, I am sure there are others.

IBM alone employs 10,000 people in RTP.

~~~
santaclaus
> I am sure there are others

There is a large government contractor presence in the triangle (DC is what, a
30 minute flight?). Epic's main office, Nvidia and Kitware have offices.

------
mannykannot
There are some highly technical (and specifically information-techical) jobs
in finance that don't seem to be included here. This may also be the case for
other areas, as well.

~~~
RobSim
As someone in finance this is quite interesting to me, do you have any
examples? Job titles or sample postings?

~~~
mannykannot
For one thing, titles beginning with 'quant' seem to be missing, though
perhaps I did not dig deep enough.

------
maxdemarzi
Move to Round Rock folks! You can get a 4000 sq.ft. home, a half acre yard and
a pool for less than a San Francisco studio. You pay $4000 a month to rent a 1
bedroom? You can rent a whole house here for half of that. Pay is the same if
you just ask. Too many jobs and not enough local people to fill them.

~~~
sputknick
I'm looking at that area. Currently in Seattle. Can you give me some advantage
of round Rock, cedar Park or Austin? My current employers office is near The
Domain in North Austin. It looks like I can get a decent house in Austin, but
cedar Park and round Rock also look nice.

~~~
jly
South Austinite so I'm a bit biased, but here's my take. Cedar Park and RR are
quite a ways out of the city and traffic in Austin heading north/south is
atrocious and getting worse, fast. You can live up there cheaply but if you're
coming for the Austin city experience, you may be disappointed. If you do end
up that far north, I would recommend looking into Pflugerville, as well, which
is a very nice area.

The Domain/Arboretum is between those suburbs and the city and it's a booming
area these days with a lot going on. My advice would be to look near there or
south of there for your housing. This gives you good commute flexibility for
jobs in the burbs and the city, and makes getting into the city much more
pleasant.

------
Kinnard
A cost-of-living adjusted list would be more interesting . . .

------
AndrewKemendo
_Rounding out the big eight, tech jobs in Washington, DC, Baltimore and
Raleigh are more traditional and offer lower salaries, making these metros
less like Silicon Valley than their fellow tech hubs._

Exactly. Here in DC it's mostly data center and infrastructure services growth
that we're seeing.

------
rmason
I've seen two surveys in the past week, one where Detroit ranked second in IT
job growth and this one by Forbes that ranked Detroit 9th.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/03/16/technolog...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/03/16/technology-
jobs-2017-san-francisco-charlotte-detroit/#19e1005038f6)

Detroit didn't rank here because the cities population is below a million. But
with the suburbs Detroit metro is 5 million and I believe that doesn't include
Ann Arbor which just ranked as a top startup hub. So this particular survey is
a little misleading.

~~~
hyperpape
Not sure what the method was, but Raleigh and Durham are both individually
smaller than Detroit, and the metro area is less than half the size of the
Detroit metro.

------
bhewes
Yep those are all the cities my tech oriented friends either live in or dream
of living in.

~~~
enjo
Denver is conspicuously absent, although the city itself isn't over a million.

~~~
bhewes
Yeah I tend to see Boulder instead of Denver. That may have to do with the
percentages of tech jobs. Denver is still a big Energy city.

------
swampthinker
Without looking, I'm going to guess (in no particular order):

\- Cambridge/Boston

\- DC metro area

\- Austin

\- Bay area

\- Seattle

\- NYC

\- Philadelphia

\- LA or San Diego

EDIT:

Hm, got most right. I forgot about the Triangle entirely, but I'm surprised
Baltimore outpaced Philly.

~~~
wenc
I'm a little surprised Chicago is not on the list. The Chicago tech scene is
not huge, but it is growing, and it is definitely much more dynamic than
Philly or LA or San Diego. It is the third largest metro in the country with a
large hinterland, so cost of living is still fairly affordable. Tales of crime
are overblown by the media -- they are mostly outside the city, and normalized
to population, is not significantly higher than other large metros.

There are also two elite schools here: Northwestern and U of Chicago, with
many other middle tier schools that can supply tech talent like UIC, DePaul,
etc. Being the mecca of the midwest, it also draws talent from many excellent
midwestern schools like UIUC, Purdue, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Argonne National Lab is also based out here. The major economy is finance for
now, but transportation is also huge (Chicago is a major transport hub).

Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. all have presence here, and startups like
Uptake and Spothero are based here. Groupon has kind of imploded though.

I don't think these folks are really looking in the right places.

~~~
tmccrmck
I've always been confused as to why Chicago _isn 't_ more of a tech hub. Great
city, great people, cheap housing, good transportation (by US standards), good
schools, etc.

Are the Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offices engineering offices? I know that
the Microsoft one is not.

~~~
closeparen
When I looked, Chicago had:

\- Cost center IT departments for the healthcare and insurance sectors out in
the exurbs (presumably low respect and high risk of outsourcing).

\- Quant trading for the commodities market downtown (and really nothing else,
unless finance is your cup of tea).

I'd _love_ to work for a SV-style technology company in Chicago.

~~~
wenc
I don't think there is an SV-style company outside of SV because the SV
ecosystem is not really replicable.

That said, Chicago has quite a few non-finance tech companies: \- Vividseats
\- Grubhub \- Spothero \- Sproutsocial \- Uptake \- Orbitz \- HERE
technologies \- Trunk Club

There are a myriad of smaller startup companies you've never heard of, as well
as traditional corporate types like IBM, etc.

------
makosdv
It would have nice to see them compare salaries and cost of living in these
hubs.

------
c3534l
So, basically in America's biggest cities. Thanks.

