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Five cities account for vast majority of growth in U.S. tech jobs: study
- Bostonian 7y agoThe NYT coverage of the study is at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/economy/innovation-jobs-cities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/economy/innovati... . 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 7y agoThe study itself is at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Full-Report-Growth-Centers_PDF_BrookingsMetro-BassCenter-ITIF.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Full-Re...
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agoAnd, 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.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoUm no its not that simple in a democracy people have to want to live there or have reasonable public transport.
- tiredyam 7y agothat is why you create incentives. grand parent was not implying that you force someone to move or companies to relocate.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoYou use incentives to relocate people or encourage companies to support remote work. Can you imagine how much people years are being wasted on workers paying landlords or mortgage bond holders for inflated housing assets just to be in a certain spot? For knowledge work? Where you're just moving bits? It's almost as bad as the collective time spent working to pay for the depreciation of personal vehicles that sit idle 95% of the time. Make Existence Less Expensive. Or, keep paying exorbitant real estate rents and mortgage payments while complaining, and being permanently behind financially unless you strike it rich with RSUs or some sort of liquidity event.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoMale? This abbreviation doesn't make much sense.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoIt's an overarching thesis, not an abbreviation.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThat would be MELE, not MALE.
- magduf 7y ago>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. Nothing is stopping other cities from creating incentives. Some cities have even tried. Of course, some cities have certain undesirable features that make in infeasible to attract companies without going to ridiculous lengths which local voters would not approve of.
- nine_zeros 7y agoFor a lot of us, the only undesirable aspect of SF bay area would be rent and housing costs. Everything else in the area is of the highest quality. SF bay area scores high on weather, food, pollution, average quality of schools, average quality of people, crimelessness, lively cities, international educated people, jobs, vibrant societies, vibrant economies etc. Housing is a major cause of all remaining evils there. Besides that, life is pretty good tbh.
- humanrebar 7y agoYMMV, but the local culture is a lot less friendly than some other places. Not that NYC is necessarily better.
- awad 7y agoI'm not sure I agree with quite a few of those points when you look at the "SF" part of "SF Bay Area". Sure, Woodside and Moraga are top tier quality of life if you can afford it, but half of SF is essentially Gotham city.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago>> And, it's doubly ironic that those are the places where it's citizens want the least amount of growth. I would add those are some areas where the cost of living is insanely high. Getting a "hi-tech" job in any of those metro areas is one thing, figuring how to live with in your budget is something completely different. I've had a myriad of friends who've gone out west and moved back after a few years because the cost of living is so high, even when they're clearing well over 100K in salary, its not enough.
- harimau777 7y agoI 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 7y agoI 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.
- logfromblammo 7y agoAs someone who moved out of the Midwest for higher-paying work, this comment is 100.01% accurate. I had to move to Chicago for my first real job--one which went away a little bit after after the early 2000s dot-com crash--and then eventually moved out of Madison, Wisconsin, when an east coast company bought my employer out and fired nearly everyone. That last time around, I was apparently making way more than the local median salary, and really needed to replace all of it and then some. Every time I think about going back, I say "minimum $120k," and they say "ope, that's a bit much for us, dere" and never call me again. It saves time, I'm sure, but very disappointing nonetheless. From Minneapolis-St.Paul to Pittsburgh is the Midwestern megacity, with zero serious geographical limits on densifying, or adding to suburban sprawl. And every company in it would happily offer $70k/year to someone with 20 years of experience, and still believe it to be "extremely generous". At first, I thought they were all lowballing for the purposes of negotiation, but it turns out that they're all uniformly miserly.
- cies 7y agoOr decentivice (is that a word?) places that have had enough growth for now (is that even possible under capitalism?). This could be federally arranged. Sure freedom, but the govt also has an allocation function, and some of these towns are said to suffer under the load of the new jobs.
- VintageLight 7y agoI think you meant "disincentivize". I agree that there should be strong incentives to spread prosperity to smaller towns. Japan has an interesting tax program that boosts the small towns in the country: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/
- humanrebar 7y ago> ...is that even possible under capitalism? I don't get why people throw around the word "capitalism" like that. The U.S. legal system isn't organized around "capitalism" in any real way. The U.S. historically was a liberal republic, though lately the republicanism had given way to a stronger administrative state on all levels. And it's that that really influences how things are influenced with respect to urban development: regulators, HUD, local zoning boards, transportation planning, transportation energy regulations, etc. Not much of that screams "private control of the means of production" or even "free market".
- cies 7y agoCapitalism is, in my opinion, any system that allows for capitalists to keep their capital. Free market has, in my opinion, very little to do with capitalism; contrary to popular belief.
- vkou 7y agoThere's nothing ironic about this. The people who don't want growth are rich techies with a 'screw you, I have mine' attitude, or aren't working tech jobs, and the only growth they are enjoying is of the rent they pay for their shoebox apartments. The former don't want growth in the form of more housing (It devalues theirs), and the latter don't want growth in the form of more jobs (Because that just means more rich people to bid up the cost of their housing.)
- scarejunba 7y agoMy experience about SF isn't that. All the wealthy startup CEOs want more homes in SF. And it bothers them that they're funneling runway into rent on their newer startups.
- zippergz 7y agoThe people who don't want rapid growth are the people who have experienced it. The people who do want growth are the ones who haven't experienced it. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
- Apes 7y agoIf the majority of people in an area experienced the negative effects of rapid growth -- doesn't that imply most of them caused the growth by moving there in the first place? Talk about locking the door behind you on the way in.
- wffurr 7y agoJob growth without commensurate growth in housing stock is a recipe for misery. The NIMBYs did it to themselves.
- api 7y agoThis 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
- buf 7y agoOnly part of this is true. Rent is a percentage of a budget. If you're playing with bigger numbers, the absolute dollar amount is still much higher after the rent percentage is taken out. When I bring home 20k a month and only 7.5k goes to rent, I still have 12.5k remaining, which is more than most of the country's entire take home pay. When I travel the world, everywhere else feels so inexpensive.
- ghaff 7y agoOf course, exchange rates--which depend on a lot of factors--have a lot to do with that. But, yeah, with some exceptions like the Nordics, Europe seems pretty inexpensive these days for a traveler from the US. Hotels are much cheaper than expensive cities like SF of course. (Which has gotten pretty much out of control over the past year; one can trivially spend $1,000/night during a big conference.) But even London and Paris are often pretty reasonable compared to random mid-tier business hotels around the US.
- duelingjello 7y agoRents in SF are crazy and unsustainable for long-term living. It's like people who pickup bottles for recycling or are Uber drivers to live in SF without a $300k/USD job. Nearly everyone there is living beyond their means (housing >30% of net income) because "it's SF." Also, the oost-of-living is much higher too.
- NDizzle 7y agoNot necessarily. I’ve been working full time remote for SF companies and getting SF wages since 2010.
- ghaff 7y ago
- chrisco255 7y agoI'd be more interested in seeing just the past few years to see how the trends are shifting.
- brenden2 7y agoKeep 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 7y agoGood point, but doesn't it make you wonder why there hasn't been much growth in NYC?
- brenden2 7y agoNot sure exactly, but a general truism is that the larger something gets, the harder growth becomes.
- omarhaneef 7y agoI would expect that to effect the big 3 as well: San Fran, San Jose and Seattle
- brenden2 7y agoThey're big, but nowhere near as big as NYC. NYC alone is larger than the whole SF Bay Area combined (around ~8.6m vs ~7.75m).
- omarhaneef 7y agoI would look at the base of tech jobs, not the population of the city as a whole. Perhaps I misread the study, but it also looks like they were counting the absolute number of new jobs, not the percentage over the population.
- nyc640 7y ago
- omarhaneef 7y agoThe 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.
- akl_bh 7y agoThe Washington DC area might be doing better now, give this data is from 2005-2017 before all the HQ-2 drama happened.
- ohashi 7y agoI also wonder what that graph looks like. DC was a tech powerhouse for a while with dulles corridor and the likes of AOL et al. But I'm not exactly sure when that really dwindled. I could see something resembling a U shape from that going down but DC growing if you changed the starting date a little later. Just throwing it out there, and Amazon will probably increase those numbers. The city's tech growth may not be stunning but the city itself is growing and there's definitely no shortage of money.
- bksenior 7y agoAlso LA too
- georgeecollins 7y agoI think for LA and NYC they start from a much bigger employment base and there are different trends in "tech", some going up, some going down. Like in LA a lot less manufacturing and aerospace (did you know LA county was #1 in both for a while?) and more VC style tech. NYC probably has similar trends I wouldn't know as well.
- wayoutthere 7y agoAustin isn't really a growth driver in tech as much as a place to go for the companies that are priced out of California. Come for the low taxes, stay for the non-existent labor law!
- blaser-waffle 7y ago> 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 7y ago> 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.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/73KV7 http://archive.is/73KV7
- Melting_Harps 7y agoUpvoted, can you remind me of the current steps for bypassing a paywall these days?
- samename 7y agoCan never get this site to load for some reason
- neonate 7y agoSeparating 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 7y agoThose splits are probably based on census metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- neonate 7y agoThanks! After digging around the various Wikipedia pages I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose%E2%80%93San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland,_CA_Combined_Statistical_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose%E2%80%93San_Francisco..., 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.
- bobthepanda 7y agoThose are Census metropolitan statistical areas. > The U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines a set of core based statistical areas (CBSAs) throughout the country. CBSAs are delineated on the basis of a central urban area or urban cluster – in other words: a contiguous area of relatively high population density. CBSAs are composed of counties and county equivalents.[3] The counties containing the core urban area are known as the central counties of the CBSA. A central county is a county in which 50% of its population lives in urban areas of at least 10,000 in population, or where a population of 5,000 are located in a single urban area of at least 10,000 in population where that urban area is split between more than one county.[4] Additional surrounding counties, known as outlying counties, can be included in the CBSA if these counties have strong social and economic ties to the central counties as measured by commuting and employment. Outlying counties are included in the CBSA if 25% of the workers living in the county work in the central county or counties or, conversely, 25% of the employment in the county is held by workers who live in the central county or counties. All counties in a CBSA must be contiguous, and a county can only be included within one CBSA.[4] In New England, towns have precedence over counties, so statistically similar areas are defined in terms of town-based units known as New England city and town areas (NECTAs). > Adjacent CBSAs are merged into a single CBSA when the central county or counties of one CBSA qualify as an outlying county or counties to the other CBSAs.[4] One or more CBSAs may be grouped together or combined to form a larger statistical entity known as a combined statistical area (CSA) when the employment interchange measure (EIM) reaches 15% or more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area San Jose and SF are combined in a combined statistical area, but the linkages are not strong enough to consider them a single metropolitan statistical area.
- nabla9 7y agoThe 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 7y agoFor 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 7y agoIt 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 7y agoI 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.
- nabla9 7y agoYou should look up the term "agglomeration effects" or "agglomeration economiies" This is the stuff that urban economists study and very interesting subject. Cities are like hivemind. The mind works better when things bump together constantly. Network theory can be used to explain some of that. There is more edges between nodes and more integration. Some of the effects is just accidental information transfer when people are more likely to meet by accident. Other are knowledge spillovers like intellectual connections among inventors and diffusing useful knowledge. There are returns to scale, clustering effects. Labor market pooling is important. The easiest to understand is reducing the costs of moving goods over space (Pizza delivery has higher productivity when distances are shorter).
- vannevar 7y agoI'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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tracer4201 7y agoThese 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 7y agoSenior Facebook engineers in the Seattle area make $180k, where are you getting your information?
- akhilcacharya 7y agoLevels.fyi Senior FB engineers make more than double that at E5.
- tracer4201 7y agoOne call out - senior engineers at FB are a different breed and caliber altogether vs a “senior developer” at your typical insurance company or someone contracting AngularJS development in a senior role for an oil and gas company. People see the word senior and think it’s an apples to apples comparison. I’m not saying the FB engineers are “better”, but I am saying the level of ownership, design, code quality, etc is day and night different... an environment like FB, Amazon, Google etc will force you to become a great developer (rigorous code reviews, various levels or owning what you wrote, supporting your services, developing run books, etc etc. My 2 cents from my experience on both sides (working in non tech companies and big tech companies).
- quantumfoam 7y agoLet’s all submit a page that people without a subscription could read. Seriously, fuck you.
- Melting_Harps 7y agoInteresting, 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-hubs-in-the-us-according-to-bloomberg-2019-11-1028700143#12-fort-collins-co1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/top-12-tech-... It just goes to show just how unreliable the data can be used depending on the desired effect.
- ravitation 7y agoExcept the Business Insider list has nothing to do with job growth, which is the topic of this WSJ list?
- jhallenworld 7y agoCorrelate this with cities with the most single women to see why Boston is number one on this list.