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And the Bay Area is roughly 6,900 square miles vs the 3,806,000 square miles of the US as a whole. Put another way, Silicon Valley is where you can find 10% of
by mklim 10y ago
And the Bay Area is roughly 6,900 square miles vs the 3,806,000 square miles of the US as a whole. Put another way, Silicon Valley is where you can find 10% of the total number of US developers despite it being only ~0.002% of the country's landmass. I get the general point the author is trying to make, but 10% in such a small region is still an extraordinarily high number.
- guelo 10y agoLandmass is not a useful metric since 75% of the population lives on 3 percent of the land (according to a quick google search).
- lmkg 10y agoA quick Wikipedia search says the whole Bay Area accounts for about 2% of the population of the US, and Silicon Valley itself a little over 1% (7.65MM & 3.5-4MM total, out of 324MM).
- pessimizer 10y agoSo to complete the thought, the Bay Area has about 5x the average density of programmers.
- smb06 10y agoBay Area is probably not a good metric because that would include Napa, Sonoma, etc. where you are more likely to find a farmer or a sommelier than a programmer. Silicon Valley as a measure - 1% of the country's population but 10% of its programmers. So, 10x the national average of programmers.
- addled 10y agoHey, a new definition of a "10x programmer”.
- felisml 10y agoMore are urban than non-urban, so the national average isn't a particularly useful number either. Here's a relevant page by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you scroll down a bit past the state-level charts, they start showing metropolitan areas. "San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara" has a fairly good compromise between volume and density, but it's not at the top of either chart. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151131.htm#st http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151131.htm#st
- WWLink 10y agoHehe, silicon valley people usually forget about the east/north bay and pretty much anything north of the bay bridge or hayward bridge.
- smb06 10y agoI live in San Francisco and trust me, the feeling is mutual.
- euyyn 10y agoBut then you're overestimating, as many many programmers of Silicone Valley don't live in the valley itself.
- SilasX 10y agoFor another metric, I'm getting that the Bay Area GDP is $800 billion [1] vs the overall US's $18 trillion [2], which would mean the Bay has 4.4% of the economic activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoNot all of which stems from programming.
- kctess5 10y agoCrazy to think that Google accounts for ~10% of that [1]. [1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/business-google.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
- acchow 10y agoGoogle also has physical plant properties (think data centers) and offices around the world that are producing a meaningful portion of their revenue. Btw, Apple had 3x Google's revenue in 2015. In any case, Revenue != GDP due to double counting.
- kctess5 10y agoVery true. Both are global companies, even though their headquarters are there. I wonder what fraction of their income can be attributed to the SV area, and how that translates to their contributions to the GDP.
- ryankupyn 10y agoIf you want to go deeper into this, BLS data has a fantastic metric for measuring the relative density of different occupations by metro area - the location quotient. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm As you can see, in the Bay Area, the two most common software-related occupations are ~2.9 times as common as the US as a whole (Software Developers - Systems Software, and Software Developers - Applications). But they both lose out to Solar Photovoltaic Installers and Genetic Counsellors, which are 6(!) times as more common on the Bay Area than the rest of the US (from a much smaller base, though). Edit: If you slice by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, looking only at Systems developers, the quotient goes to around 9 - far ahead of runners up in Massachusetts and Huntsville, AL.