4 ms·

That made me wonder, though, in this particular context, are these really outliers? Even just counting population, the Bay Area's CSA is 8.8M, NYC is 23.9M, Bo

by mmt 8y ago

That made me wonder, though, in this particular context, are these really outliers? Even just counting population, the Bay Area's CSA is 8.8M, NYC is 23.9M, Boston is 8.2M and LA is 18.9M. That's already over 18% of the population, just in the major urban centers of California and the Northeast. It's not much of a stretch for the percentage of tech jobs to be in those areas, and less of a stretch to imagine that the vast majority would be in some kind of high-cost area. I wasn't able to come up with suitable web search terms to find any numbers, but perhaps someone else has.

antt 8y ago
Throw in Seattle and there are no tech jobs outside those areas to a first approximation. I don't know where the people above are getting hired, but the only places I've ever seen outside those major cities are incidental programming jobs to babysit VBA code that runs some business that has nothing to do with computers.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  Denver, Austin, Houston, North Carolina, Chicago, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Boise to name a few. Granted, some of these have recently become pricey, but still nowhere near Seattle levels. Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places.
  - mmt 8y ago
    > Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places. But how many of those jobs are technical/programming (in those places)? Even by population alone (Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta making up the bulk), that's under 10.7%, less than CA+NE (and only half of CA+NE+Seattle?). That persuades me that these lower-cost areas are the exception, not the rule.
    - kthejoker2 8y ago
      Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statist... Just looking at top 50, you've got a real geographic spread - about half of the people are in CA/NE, the rest are split pretty evenly between the four quadrants...
      - mmt 8y ago
        > Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? I believe everyone in this sub-thread has used "CA" to mean the SF Bay Area plus greater Los Angeles (and certainly I have). Similary, "NE" was just shorthand for the big cities therein, not the whole region. Ultimately, population is just a very loose proxy for number of tech jobs.

by mmt 8y ago

antt 8y ago

Throw in Seattle and there are no tech jobs outside those areas to a first approximation. I don't know where the people above are getting hired, but the only places I've ever seen outside those major cities are incidental programming jobs to babysit VBA code that runs some business that has nothing to do with computers.

BeetleB 8y ago
Denver, Austin, Houston, North Carolina, Chicago, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Boise to name a few. Granted, some of these have recently become pricey, but still nowhere near Seattle levels. Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places.
- mmt 8y ago
  > Look at all big companies (and not just the recent Internet ones of the last 20 years), and look at where they have sites. Jobs in most of these places. But how many of those jobs are technical/programming (in those places)? Even by population alone (Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta making up the bulk), that's under 10.7%, less than CA+NE (and only half of CA+NE+Seattle?). That persuades me that these lower-cost areas are the exception, not the rule.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statist... Just looking at top 50, you've got a real geographic spread - about half of the people are in CA/NE, the rest are split pretty evenly between the four quadrants...
    - mmt 8y ago
      > Not sure why you'd compare Houston to all of California? I believe everyone in this sub-thread has used "CA" to mean the SF Bay Area plus greater Los Angeles (and certainly I have). Similary, "NE" was just shorthand for the big cities therein, not the whole region. Ultimately, population is just a very loose proxy for number of tech jobs.