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Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs
- swampthinker 9y agoWithout 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.
- k2xl 9y agoI was surprised Atlanta wasn't listed
- lotsofpulp 9y agoI was surprised NYC wasn't listed.
- wenc 9y agoI'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 9y agoI'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.
- wenc 9y agoYou know what, I'm not sure. I just a did a quick google, and Amazon is hiring a lot of architects and consultants but no open SDE positions. Google has SDE positions open. A lot of the tech folks here work for financial companies.
- closeparen 9y agoWhen 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 9y agoI 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.
- notfromhere 9y agoIt's actually a positive for Chicago. The economy here is highly, highly diversified. We have a large tech sector but it doesn't dominate the economy...nor would it be a good idea for it to do so
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- jeremynixon 9y agoI 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 9y agoThe reason is that they broke it down by MSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic.... Palo Alto and nearby cities are in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara MSA.
- jeremynixon 9y agoAh, 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.
- 40acres 9y agoCan 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 9y agoThe 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.
- randcraw 9y agoI left the DC area in 1998 after programming there for 13 years. Wages were suppressed by government white collar salary caps, which also constrained contractor incomes. A decade later, housing costs had more than doubled, yet wages hadn't budged. AFAIK, the CostOfLiving vs salary ratio remains just as unattractive today, making DC the most uncompetitive tech hotspot I know.
- Bahamut 9y agoIt 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 9y agoAnd 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.
- Ologn 9y agoBaltimore 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.
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- randcraw 9y agoThe 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 9y agoRed 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 9y ago> 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.
- hyperpape 9y agoI won't argue about a relative comparison to other cities, but the claim that there aren't a lot of tech jobs doesn't hold water. Searching for largest employers in Durham and Wake county, you'll see that there's a lot of tech. IBM is third largest overall employer in Durham, SAS is fifth in Wake, Cisco is seventh, followed by plenty of others that aren't quite as big. (Red Hat headquarters are here but they don't even make the list I searched http://d4.nccommerce.com/QCEWLargestEmployers.aspx http://d4.nccommerce.com/QCEWLargestEmployers.aspx). What the triangle doesn't have is "sexy" tech. There's a lot of medium or small satellite offices, companies like Fidelity, Lenovo or Credit Suisse hiring people, and so on. Far fewer consumer oriented startups.
- jkw 9y agoBreaking 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 9y agoI 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.
- andrewfong 9y agoYou can be in both metro areas for the same job even. My wife works for Adobe. She spends half her time in SF and half her time in San Jose, depending on whom she needs to work with on any given day.
- Benjammer 9y agoThey 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 9y agoI was just wondering why NYC was not on that list. Baltimore is very close to DC, is it really two different regions?
- vkjv 9y agoNot 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 9y agoAnd 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'.
- ynniv 9y agoI 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-Talent-2017 https://www.cbre.com/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-Talen... 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
- frandroid 9y agoI was like, hot damn, cheap housing and good paying jobs, I'm moving to Baltimore!!
- ynniv 9y agoYou could legitimately say similar things about Atlanta though.
- jdavis703 9y agoWell you could move to Baltimore and take the MARC train into your DC tech job if cheap housing is what you're optimizing for.
- cakedoggie 9y agoCheap housing and long travel times are not enviable at all.
- flukus 9y agoAs far as long travel times go, trains can be good because you can take your laptop and it's usable time to work on your own projects, watch a movie, play games etc. I'd be more concerned (with zero knowledge of washington) over whether or not the train + connections would take me near most of the tech jobs.
- mannykannot 9y agoThere 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 9y agoAs someone in finance this is quite interesting to me, do you have any examples? Job titles or sample postings?
- mannykannot 9y agoFor one thing, titles beginning with 'quant' seem to be missing, though perhaps I did not dig deep enough.
- bhewes 9y agoYep those are all the cities my tech oriented friends either live in or dream of living in.
- rmason 9y agoI'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/technology-jobs-2017-san-francisco-charlotte-detroit/#19e1005038f6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/03/16/technolog... 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 9y agoNot 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.
- mgoblu3 9y agoSecond in IT job growth is completely due to the auto industry, both the Big 3 and all of the suppliers. While they are good jobs, cost of living here is pretty cheap so jobs are only good paying relative to COL in those other areas (and it's mostly due to the vast sprawl of suburbs like you mentioned). It does not include Ann Arbor, but Ann Arbor is a real small city compared to anything else that would pop up in those surveys.
- zw123456 9y agoReasons 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.
- dandr01d 9y agoTraffic has gotten so much worse since I first came here in 2011. The good news is that Seattle is small enough that you can walk to most places just fine, and the bus and light rail systems are fantastic.
- acidburnNSA 9y agoIt's been getting progressively worse, but they recently added HOV lanes both ways on I-90 between Seattle and Bellevue and that has decreased commuter congestion fairly markedly for pretty much everyone who lives in Seattle and work on the Eastside. The HOV lane additions eliminated a few merges so it's now better for everyone. Once the train is running in place of the recently-bygone reversible express lanes life will be even better.
- micaksica 9y agoAs a motorcyclist, whenever I was in SEA on my motorcycle I was always dismayed that lane splitting / filtering is not legal in the state. Motorcycling is still the fastest way (for me) around SF and the Bay Area, and the lane splitting in dead stopped traffic is a large reason why I started riding in the first place.
- uiri 9y agoCalifornia is the only state in the US where that is legal. I'm guessing serious traffic problems are the reason why.
- RhysU 9y agoChicken-and-egg: no other state allows lane splitting out of concern the citizens wouldn't know how to drive amongst such motorcyclists. Also, motorcycles aren't exactly a large block of votes. And, many lane splitting bills include helmet provisions which are a non-starter for some riders. Source: watched as attempts failed multiple times in Texas.
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- bit_logic 9y agoDisappointed 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.
- majormajor 9y agoLike NY, the population is just way too big for percentage ranked metrics. Those metrics can be misleading, though: if you want to change jobs, you care more about "total number of other interesting opportunities in this one field" than "number of opportunities in this field compared to other fields."
- 60654 9y agoYeah, same story with Chicago. Big tech scene (esp finance), some big universities (Northwestern, UChicago, UofI, IIT, etc)... But in the end, it's the country's third largest city, the metro area is huge, and tech is just one industry of many. The number of jobs may be large, but the percentage will never be as high as with small, specialized towns.
- nsxwolf 9y agoAnd I see that your handle is the zip code for River North. Well played.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> NYC isn't on the list because finance dominates there In 2014, New York City had 165,300 finance jobs (NAIC code 523) and 365,500 tech jobs (541), broadly defined [1]. To illustrate why this article's metric is silly, consider that in 2014 about 4.1 million people were employed in New York City [2][3]. Thus 4% of employees worked in finance and 9% in tech. Hoboken, New Jersey, meanwhile, had 34,054 people employed in 2014 [4] and, in 2015, about 7,300 employed in finance [5] (22% of total employment). I guess we should crown Hoboken, instead of New York City, as the nation's new financial capital. [1] https://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/PDFs/Significant-Industries-New-York-City.pdf https://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/PDFs/Significant-Industries-N... [2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/data/xg-tables/ro2xgcesnyc.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/data/xg-tabl... [3] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-economy/employment-patterns-nyc.pdf http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/n... [4] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_industries https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_industri... [5] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_occupations https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_occupati...
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoRounding 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.
- maxdemarzi 9y agoMove 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.
- pryelluw 9y agoMind sharing more?
- rconti 9y agoHot as hell. More humid than hell half the time, oddly dry the other half.
- maxdemarzi 9y agoSure it's hot and humid, thankfully everything is Air Conditioned and I'm in the pool every night. No public transportation means no public transportation that smells like urine. Since housing is so cheap everyone has nice cars.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoSounds like you'd have a lot of traffic then....
- ospfer 9y ago...which we do. Getting into Austin from one of the suburbs is a nightmare during rush hour and still a slow 'stop-and-go' at all other times.
- ido 9y agoThe desirability of transit is not because people love taking the subway, it's because cars as the main form of transport do not scale well with city size. Anecdotal example: when we lived in Tel Aviv (bad transit, although probably not as bad as many places in the US) I had several jobs and it would take me 50-60 minutes to get from home to work or vice versa. This was not just me but is usual in greater Tel Aviv, unless you can afford to live in the city (almost nobody with kids does, metro tel aviv has 3.7m residents vs 450k for the city itself). We've lived in Vienna before we moved and moved to Berlin after, both cities with great transit (that sometimes smell like piss). Both metros are comparable in size to TLV (metro Vienna 2.6m, metro Berlin 4.5m) and I've had several jobs in either - it usually takes 30-40 minutes to get to work and again it's not just me but the common case.
- vancan1ty 9y agoWhatever 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?
- Tade0 9y agoTo me the future is now. I telecommute to a place that's 1400km(875 miles) away. Funny thing is apartments are less expensive in the city in which the office is located, but I choose not to live there.
- sotojuan 9y agoDespite what HN may say, remote working is still fairly rare and highly competitive. Managers will want to see butts in seats for a long time.
- rpazyaquian 9y agoTelecommuting/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 9y agoNah, they're hiring remote workers like crazy. They're just working very remotely: India.
- Nokinside 9y agoThis 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 9y agoCities 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.
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- paul6987 9y agoDC 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.
- rpazyaquian 9y agoBoston 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 9y agoThe 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 9y agoSounds like SNAFU to me.
- simonsarris 9y ago> Boston doesn't seem to be doing very well in the long-term. Can you expand on this?
- rpazyaquian 9y agoI was going off of what the article said - not so much my own perception of the market.
- Finnucane 9y agoI guess it depends on what you count as a 'tech job.' I'm in Cambridge, and obviously the universities are major employers, and biotech/pharma is a dominant industry (our neighborhood surrounded by labs).
- rpazyaquian 9y agoSoftware engineering, I guess, which is my field. I've heard that university work in this tends to be mediocre (and with pay to match), although biotech/pharma can be good.
- Kinnard 9y agoA cost-of-living adjusted list would be more interesting . . .
- makosdv 9y agoIt would have nice to see them compare salaries and cost of living in these hubs.
- robmass94 9y agoAtlanta, Baltimore ... my perception of these is that they are unsafe.
- c3534l 9y agoSo, basically in America's biggest cities. Thanks.