
Five cities account for vast majority of growth in U.S. tech jobs: study - Bostonian
https://www.wsj.com/articles/five-cities-account-for-vast-majority-of-growth-in-tech-jobs-study-finds-11575867660
======
neonate
Separating San Jose and San Francisco obscures how much the Bay Area is
dominating this data. That'll be even more of an issue if they're failing to
count the rest of the Bay Area (Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc.) with those
two. Are they?

Edit: the report seems to define the areas as "San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward"
and "San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara", so it looks like they're including more
than just SF and SJ. But the strange way they draw those lines seems
arbitrary, making me wonder why they split up the Bay Area to begin with. And
again: are they leaving other parts of the SF Bay Area out? and how much
bigger would the total get if so? Edit: they're not. See below.

~~~
showerst
Those splits are probably based on census metropolitan statistical areas
(MSAs)

~~~
neonate
Thanks! After digging around the various Wikipedia pages I found
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose%E2%80%93San_Francisco...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose%E2%80%93San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland,_CA_Combined_Statistical_Area),
whose table seems to make it clear that the peninsula is all included in
either the SJ or the SF MSAs. So they're not leaving out PA or MV or anything
like that.

------
vannevar
I'll bet if you dig deeper into the data, you'll also find that most of the
growth was driven by a handful of companies, and the cities were along for the
ride.

~~~
tracer4201
These cities have the companies where people want to work at. They also pay
handsomely. Seattle, for instance, is expensive, sure - but a grad a couple
years after college can be making $200K easy in Seattle vs maybe just north of
$100K in a place like OKC for a more senior role.

I would recommend techies go work at one of these big tech companies, at least
for several years and save up for your future. Then move to the Midwest if
your goal is to live in a suburb in a several thousand square foot home.

~~~
t-writescode
Senior Facebook engineers in the Seattle area make $180k, where are you
getting your information?

~~~
corporateslave5
180k? Fresh grads make that

~~~
t-writescode
Glassdoor has the average software engineer salary in Seattle at 124k with
149k as the upper bound on their chart. I’m speaking about the Seattle area in
general. Facebook is the highest salary I’ve seen where a former coworker
moved on to a 180k salary.

I have no idea where you guys are working and getting those salaries in the
Seattle area, which is what I’m talking about.

~~~
corporateslave5
Glassdoor is 100% wrong...

Plus that isn’t including stock and bonus

Go to levels.fyi

~~~
t-writescode
Stock bonuses usually vest over several years, so I’m not convinced that
that’s appropriate to call it a single year’s compensation. The 50k+ you get
as a new hire at Microsoft (or got) took 4 years to vest, so it was only a
salary increase of around 15k per year, not 50k in compensation.

~~~
corporateslave5
Look you’re wrong. Senior engineer at Facebook makes 350-500k

------
Bostonian
The NYT coverage of the study is at
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/economy/innovati...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/economy/innovation-
jobs-cities.html) .

Quoting the paywalled WSJ story: "Just five metropolitan areas—Boston; San
Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and San Jose, Calif.—accounted for 90% of all
U.S. high-tech job growth between 2005 to 2017, according to the research by
think-tank scholars Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution
and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

The nation’s 377 other metro areas accounted for 10% of the 256,063 jobs
created during that period in 13 high-tech industries such as software
publishing, pharmaceutical manufacturing and semiconductor production. Among
the smaller cities that gained tech jobs were Madison, Wis.; Albany, N.Y.;
Provo, Utah; and Pittsburgh."

~~~
mlinksva
The study itself is at [https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/12/Full-Re...](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2019/12/Full-Report-Growth-Centers_PDF_BrookingsMetro-
BassCenter-ITIF.pdf)

------
omarhaneef
The surprise for me is the cities that were not part of it: NYC, Washington DC
area, some tech cities in Colorado and Austin.

It just goes to show you that our intuitions about some of these things are
flat out wrong.

~~~
dsunshine
The NYTimes article on the study has more numbers. What's odd about DC is the
number of losses seems high but it's hard to tell how big that is in
proportion.

For example, Silicon Valley and San Francisco gained a huge number. However,
Madison Wisconsin was in the top ten and is a much smaller metro area.
Washington lost 7k but it's a big metro - especially compared to Wichita.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/economy/innovati...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/economy/innovation-
jobs-cities.html)

And North Carolina is just weird - Durham lost 6k but Raleigh gained 12k? Are
people just moving from Durham County to Wake County?

~~~
omarhaneef
yeah, I had similar thoughts. Using absolute numbers makes sense of some
cities, using the expansion over a tech base for others, and expansion over
total base for yet others.

From the NYtimes piece it looks like they use absolute numbers but the study
itself seems to run a mix of analyses including absolute, % change etc.

Their definition of an innovation job might have something to do with it, too.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/73KV7](http://archive.is/73KV7)

~~~
samename
Can never get this site to load for some reason

~~~
jey
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

~~~
samename
Interesting, thanks

------
thorwasdfasdf
And, it's doubly ironic that those are the places where it's citizens want the
least amount of growth. In SF for example, there's a lot of tech hate.

I think it's time to create incentives for companies to move to cities that
actually want to grow. where jobs go, people WILL follow.

~~~
harimau777
I think that the problem is that people don't want to live in many of
America's cities and I'm not sure that there's much the cities can do to
change that.

\- They cannot force their population to have more progressive attitudes
towards different types of people.

\- There's not much they can do to make themselves culturally important in the
way that cities like SF, LA, and New York are.

\- It's unlikely that they will be willing to spend what it would cost to
build public transportation.

The only way I could see cities getting tech workers to want to live there is
if they did something that resulted in the workers having significantly higher
salaries. Something like having no state or local income tax and paying part
of their federal income tax.

~~~
threwawasy1228
I would literally move to nearly anywhere in the midwest, in a heartbeat if
they paid real salaries. I see it now, the hundreds of HN comments from years
past talking about COL differences.The salaries I've seen in the midwest are
what would have been reasonable in 2006, even adjusting for CoL differences.
These companies are just not keeping pace with the market. This "oh the CoL
differences" line was valid in the past, and still is valid in the few tech
cities that have kept pace properly like Austin, but for most places it is a
excuse to trick people into accepting lower salaries than people are worth
regardless of what local rent costs.

Ever notice how everybody here knows Austin even though it is flyover small
town? I feel like I repeat myself a hundred thousand times. Almost EVERY city
in the midwest, every city, would be as viable a location as Austin is, if the
companies there weren't cheapskates and paid people what they were worth.

~~~
kickopotomus
It's pretty disingenuous to call Austin a "flyover small town".

> Austin is the capital of Texas and the 11th largest city in the United
> States, and the 3rd largest state capital. The population of Austin is
> estimated at 964,254, which is an increase of more than 3% over the last
> census in 2010. [1]

Midwest cities are not viable Austin replacements. One of the many reasons for
it's success is the University of Texas. It's a research university and one of
the largest in the world. Add to that the fact that Austin has a pretty rich
culture, temperate climate, and plenty to do; and now you have a place that
people want to relocate to.

[1]: [http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/austin-
population...](http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/austin-population/)

~~~
greggman2
that's a small fly over town in my book. You can walk from one side to the
other in an hour. first time I went to Austin I was shocked at how small it
is. Drove in , 14 blocks and a few minutes later drove out. It might be #11 in
the USA but it's still small compared Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, London, New
York, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Nanjing, Hanzhou, Bejing etc...

~~~
non-entity
> It might be #11 in the USA but it's still small compared Tokyo, Shanghai,
> Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Nanjing, Hanzhou,
> Bejing etc...

I wonder if that's because American cities tend to have much of the population
in surrounding suburbs and towns that are often separate municipalities. For
example the city of Atlanta is pretty small, with a population of under
500,000, but the metropolitan area has about 6 million in total spanning a
number of counties

~~~
wayoutthere
The list doesn't change a lot when you measure by metropolitan area.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities)
breaks down the list across several measurement methods.

------
brenden2
Keep in mind they're measuring "growth", which is probably why NYC is notably
absent as it has long had a large tech sector for a long time (if you count
tech in financial services as "tech jobs"). From what I gleaned this is not a
measure of the absolute size of the job market.

Additionally, I'm guessing they probably don't even count traditional tech
jobs (i.e., those at big companies doing boring things).

~~~
omarhaneef
Good point, but doesn't it make you wonder why there hasn't been much growth
in NYC?

~~~
brenden2
Not sure exactly, but a general truism is that the larger something gets, the
harder growth becomes.

~~~
omarhaneef
I would expect that to effect the big 3 as well: San Fran, San Jose and
Seattle

~~~
nyc640
The study covered the time period 2005-2017, which coincides with the rapid
growth of tech in the Bay Area (particularly SF) so it makes more sense in
that context.

~~~
omarhaneef
Yeah, I guess the top 3 have so much momentum.

I was just surprised to see that Boston, San Diego, Raleigh, Madison beat out
Austin and NYC in absolute numbers.

~~~
ghaff
The numbers don't include finance which is probably why no NYC. San Diego is a
bit surprising but Boston presumably counts all the biotech in Cambridge in
addition to the satellite offices of the various West Coast "tech" companies
and other high-tech.

~~~
wayoutthere
This; the "satellite effect" is huge in NYC -- sometimes the NYC satellite
campuses are bigger than the main ones. If a company has a second location,
it's usually NYC.

------
nabla9
The conclusion of the article seems to be backwards.

It's likely that growth concentrating in few cities is outcome from
agglomeration effects, not some random fluke or error. Cities have more growth
per capita than non-urban areas. Big cities have more growth than smaller
cities. Largest cities have even more growth.

It's likely that you can't spread the growth more evenly without slowing it
down, but you can reduce the negative externalizes. Help big cities grow even
larger and help smaller places to prosper as much as they can.

~~~
tabtab
For some reason we can't "spread the load" of economic activity so that we are
not all crammed into dots on the map.

I suspect this is partially due to the specialization needed to globally
compete. You have to hire lots of specialists to compete and put them in the
same building so they are collaborating efficiently. Tele-work hasn't yet
lived up to the promise, perhaps because office politics matter, and tele-work
hides one from the real going-ons.

~~~
ghaff
It really depends. I mostly work remote--technically I'm assigned to an office
but don't even have a desk there--but am in a very distributed group within a
relatively distributed company. Most of the external people we work with (and
our customers) are very distributed anyway. But, yes, on-site is still the
default for both good and bad reasons.

~~~
tabtab
I can see that working once everyone knows the systems and each other's
tendencies and habits, but a new person pretty much needs to be embedded to
absorb unwritten information.

------
api
This trend renders the high wages of high tech meaningless, since it all goes
to real estate.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent)

~~~
burlesona
It's really complicated.

Living in SF, with a family, what I would observe is that people mostly just
live in housing units / arrangements that their peers in other cities would
find "unacceptable," for the "percentage of budget" reason mentioned in a
sibling comment.

I know some married couples that still have "roommates" to cut costs. I know a
lot of families with one or more kids in apartments < 1000sqft. The majority
of single folks I know have 4-5 roommates in small apartments, some sharing
bedrooms.

None of that is, in and of itself, that unusual or problematic. What's unusual
is that the people who do this often earn somewhere from $200-$500k/yr.

It's pretty difficult to explain to people who live elsewhere why you'd be
willing to live in a small apartment and pay $4k/mo... unless you're willing
to break out your budget spreadsheet and show them that by putting up with the
housing, you get to have a very interesting job and that you are putting six
figures a year into savings.

When you know that you only have to put up with it for 5-10 years to be able
to semi "retire" to anywhere else in the country, it's much easier to put up
with.

See also places like the North Slope in Alaska, where living conditions are
rather harsh but people take the work because of the extraordinary pay.

~~~
ghaff
>See also places like the North Slope in Alaska, where living conditions are
rather harsh but people take the work because of the extraordinary pay.

There certainly are jobs that some mostly younger people take with the
expectation that they come with sort of a lousy lifestyle but they'll put away
lots of money and they'll do them for a fairly limited length of time. (A lot
of these jobs are in the oil business but it arguably also applies to things
like investment banking and Big Law where you pay your dues for a few years
and either make partner or get out.)

I'm not sure how many people working for big tech companies in the Bay Area
have that sort of mindset though. [And, as root_axis notes, I'm not sure the
numbers work for most developers starting out. One difference with the North
Slope, etc. example is that you don't have a lot of expenses with those kinds
of jobs.]

~~~
burlesona
Totally anecdota, but working at <bigcorp> I would say it's close to 100% of
new grad hires here, and probably 60-70% of older (35+) engineers? Many people
come here even at age 32-35 because they realized working in <midwestern city>
that they were never going to get the big break that even 5 years in the Bay
Area would give them. So they arrive with a 5-year plan to shovel away
savings, then return to <midwestern city> where they'll be able to pay cash
for a really nice house and return to their old life but with a much nicer
lifestyle and economic base to live on from there on out.

~~~
ghaff
Interesting. It's not an attitude I've ever seen in the Boston area but
salaries aren't generally at Bay Area levels either. (And although metro
Boston/Cambridge housing has gone up quite a bit, the area as a whole is quite
a bit more affordable than the Bay Area.)

~~~
akhilcacharya
What? I'm in Cambridge, TC is identical at the Big4 here.

(Of course, I pay more in rent than my SF and Seattle friends..)

------
blaser-waffle
> Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego—accounted for more
> than 90% of the nation’s innovation-sector growth during the years 2005 to
> 2017

Why 2005 and why'd it drop off post-2017?

Also surprised DC and NYC aren't on the list. Lots of new companies and growth
in those areas, but I guess they may not qualify as "innovation-sector
growth".

~~~
westurner
> _To that end, the present paper proposes that Congress assemble and award to
> a select set of metropolitan areas a major package of federal innovation
> inputs and supports that would accelerate their innovation-sector scale-up.
> Along these lines, we envision Congress establishing a rigorous competitive
> process by which the most promising eight to 10 potential growth centers
> would receive substantial financial and regulatory support for 10 years to
> become self-sustaining new innovation centers. Such an initiative would not
> only bring significant economic opportunity to more parts of the nation, but
> also boost U.S. competitiveness on the global stage._

"Potential growth centers" sounds promising.

------
chrisco255
I'd be more interested in seeing just the past few years to see how the trends
are shifting.

------
Melting_Harps
Interesting, Boulder is not on that list according to WSJ; but in
BusinessInsider its #1 on the tech hub list with data from Bloomberg:

[https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/top-12-tech-...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/top-12-tech-
hubs-in-the-us-according-to-bloomberg-2019-11-1028700143#12-fort-collins-co1)

It just goes to show just how unreliable the data can be used depending on the
desired effect.

~~~
ravitation
Except the Business Insider list has nothing to do with job growth, which is
the topic of this WSJ list?

------
jhallenworld
Correlate this with cities with the most single women to see why Boston is
number one on this list.

