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Tech Jobs Are Everywhere Now

51 points by tacon 5y ago

dekkers 5y ago
https://archive.is/Mi3S5 https://archive.is/Mi3S5
Noumenon72 5y ago
If cities improved productivity by bringing more people in contact with each other, imagine everyone able to connect from anywhere. And without leaving their local communities, so there's no brain drain and less social atomization.
- typest 5y ago
  There is a huge opportunity left on the table by so many of America’s cities to, basically, build a great city that can scale, attract everyone, use taxes to provide public goods, rinse, repeat. Unfortunately, none of our cities seem to be able to be able to grow without housing getting more expansive and traffic getting terrible.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    What you're describing is pretty broadly true around the world. Certainly some cities, especially those with strong urban planning authority, do better with transit and new housing than others. But most cities with high demand to live there worldwide are expensive for locals who are usually also unhappy with various aspects of transit/traffic/etc.
    - typest 5y ago
      I believe it. I don’t mean to imply this is only true for America — I just didn’t want to overstate my case. Perhaps once we get really good at asynchronous work, the opportunity will be on the table for one city to try to import substantial numbers of people from all across the world.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        One of the challenges is that, with rare exceptions, cities don't build out in advance of demand and, once the demand is there, rebuilding housing, transportation, and other systems is often expensive and disruptive--and can really be hard without a strong central authority. Singapore is probably about as good an example as any (at least outside of China) of centralized urban planning (and they even have an interesting gallery on it https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate). But, while getting around Singapore works pretty well, it's certainly not a city you would call especially affordable in general.
chrischattin 5y ago
The only reason to start a tech company in CA was the proximity to talent and capital. I always found it funny that supposedly cutting edge high tech VC’s wanted you nearby when we had all the tools to base anywhere in the world. Seemed like they were unnecessarily limiting deal potential. Same thing with engineers. Now that remote work has accelerated into the mainstream, there is zero reason to base in CA, and many reasons to go elsewhere. Also, the CA of today is very different from the one that cradled the computing industry.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  CA still has large and growing industries that could be great clients. I agree there is zero reason to focus on engineering talent in CA but depending on your company it might make a lot of sense to build with a sales team in CA.
- imnotreallynew 5y ago
  Do others also feel this way? I moved to San Francisco a few years ago with the sole goal of starting a tech company. The “cushiness” of my well paid day job has made me a bit lazy in that regard, but it’s still the goal. However, I’ve become extremely disenchanted with the city and state, so the idea that tech startup == San Francisco is the only thing keeping me here.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    You likely want connections that you can only develop there, but once you actually start, VCs don't care where you, just who you are and who can vouch for you.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    FWIW I'm working on a tech startup far away from SF, so it's possible. However we're arguably not a startup since we're not really engineered for hypergrowth as much as slowly and methodically building a self-funded, profitable product company. As such issues like raising funding and hiring quickly are not things we're concerned with, which might be why we're doing fine outside of SF. When we do hire it's 100% remote so our location isn't hurting us in that regard. We feel like this is the best choice for our company as we retain 100% ownership and can focus on a straightforward business model of selling people a product that solves their problem at a fair price. Arguably the possible upside would be higher if we tried to go the VC route and get huge fast, but then the potential downside goes up as well. This way we're working ourselves into what amount to incredibly high paying jobs while also owning the asset that is the company.
yuy910616 5y ago
It seems to me, from reading the charts, that it still follows power law distribution, just with different cities. In other words, the labor dynamic that creates super star cities are still very much in place, just with new cities. Is that a fair reading? Also, tangentially, what statistics should I calculate if I want to measure how "concentrated" the distribution is? The first thing that comes to mind is Gini coef, does that apply here or is there something else? The question I'm trying to answer is if the jobs are more dispersed among different cities or concentrated - assuming the cities themselves don't matter.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Well, city size (or really metro size presumably) follows some sort of power law-ish distribution in general. So, if you look at tech employers who historically mostly hired people from certain regions on the West Coast and see where they're hiring today, it's not surprising that they'd tend to cluster around larger metros given that's where a lot of people are. (Or at least there are more people in X large metros than there are in X arbitrarily-chosen smaller towns and cities.) I'm guessing to study concentration more broadly you really want to study a broader distribution of companies. I'm not sure that looking primarily at CA outflows for future job positions is necessarily an unbiased look at tech job distribution more broadly (and really not just tech jobs but employment at large West Coast tech companies in general).
ramesh31 5y ago
Too bad the interview process is such a nightmare. It's literally given me PTSD at this point. I'd love to try out a new opportunity, but the thought of that nightmare process leaves me grateful and content where I'm at. I've also noticed a lot of rising credentialism in the industry. BS CS is now listed on practically every job posting. With the massive rise in CS grads in the US I truly don't know how a self taught dev like myself could even get a shot at a junior role anymore.
- mathattack 5y ago
  It’s getting tougher for the first job but not for the 2nd, where word of mouth (a strong referral from a colleague who worked with you) carries much more weight than resume. My understanding is the Googles of the world are de-emphasizing degrees but they can’t hire everyone. And you have to pass their technical interview.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >It’s getting tougher for the first job but not for the 2nd, where word of mouth (a strong referral from a colleague who worked with you) carries much more weight than resume. I've gotten plenty of employee referrals in the past because people I've worked with know I'm a solid developer, but honestly I just politely refuse them at this point. Every single time it happens, the company just drops you straight into the standard interview pipeline with zero benefit other than perhaps skipping a recruiter phone call. And when I'm inevitably not able to solve some random whiteboard problem or whatever, and I get rejected, it makes the friendship weird from then on.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      There are basically two kinds of referrals: The first is employees put the names of people they know and have maybe worked with a bit into the system attached to an open position with the hope, in part, that they'll get a referral bonus down the road. That's going to basically go through the regular process. When I've gotten a job directly or indirectly through someone I knew, it's been through people I've worked with in the past and were usually in a position to at least influence the hiring. I'm not sure any of those jobs (which I've just had a few of) was even against a posted position.
madengr 5y ago
The definition of “tech” keep expanding. Amazon is a retail company, not tech. Walmart would be “tech” too. Loan processing is not tech, neither id advertising (all social media companies). I’m a traditional EE, and don’t want to be associated with “tech” even though I actually work in technology.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Good luck finding anything but 4th rate betacuck tax cattle in USA.
binarynate 5y ago
What are some of the most underrated US cities for tech? One that comes to my mind is Nashville. It seems to have a considerable tech scene, the music scene is great, and it's much more affordable than, say, Austin.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I suppose it depends what you mean by "for tech." If it's to work in tech locally, the situation with smaller cities is likely to be mostly a function of what jobs are available there. And note that many tech employers--indeed most until fairly recently--were in office parks not downtown. If you have more flexibility with remote work, there are a ton of smaller cities that many people like. You mentioned Nashville. Some others that come to mind are Raleigh, Minneapolis, Portsmouth NH, Portland ME... The one caveat I would make with a number of these cities is that the walkable (gentrified) downtown is often pretty small so it's really a very different experience from living/working in a large city.
  - packetlost 5y ago
    Can confirm. Live in Madison, WI. People here call it a "city" and "tech hub" but the downtown is like 3 square blocks and there's like half a dozen """tech""" companies in the area and maybe twice as many small startups. lol
    - ghaff 5y ago
      A ton of college towns are like that. The college/uni does bring some degree of "culture" and other entertainment and spur some tech-related companies you wouldn't find in an equivalently-sized place that didn't have a college attached, but the options are limited. I worked in downtown Nashua NH for a number of years. The downtown was actually quite nice. On the river, quite a few restaurants, some shops, etc. But yeah, outside of a few blocks adjacent to maybe 5 or 6 blocks of Main Street, things either started to get sketchy or just started to blend into the strip mall and industrial parks south of town. Raleigh, where I sometimes travel to because we have a big office there, is very similar.

51 points by tacon 5y ago

https://archive.is/Mi3S5 https://archive.is/Mi3S5

If cities improved productivity by bringing more people in contact with each other, imagine everyone able to connect from anywhere. And without leaving their local communities, so there's no brain drain and less social atomization.

typest 5y ago
There is a huge opportunity left on the table by so many of America’s cities to, basically, build a great city that can scale, attract everyone, use taxes to provide public goods, rinse, repeat. Unfortunately, none of our cities seem to be able to be able to grow without housing getting more expansive and traffic getting terrible.
- ghaff 5y ago
  What you're describing is pretty broadly true around the world. Certainly some cities, especially those with strong urban planning authority, do better with transit and new housing than others. But most cities with high demand to live there worldwide are expensive for locals who are usually also unhappy with various aspects of transit/traffic/etc.
  - typest 5y ago
    I believe it. I don’t mean to imply this is only true for America — I just didn’t want to overstate my case. Perhaps once we get really good at asynchronous work, the opportunity will be on the table for one city to try to import substantial numbers of people from all across the world.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      One of the challenges is that, with rare exceptions, cities don't build out in advance of demand and, once the demand is there, rebuilding housing, transportation, and other systems is often expensive and disruptive--and can really be hard without a strong central authority. Singapore is probably about as good an example as any (at least outside of China) of centralized urban planning (and they even have an interesting gallery on it https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate). But, while getting around Singapore works pretty well, it's certainly not a city you would call especially affordable in general.

chrischattin 5y ago

The only reason to start a tech company in CA was the proximity to talent and capital. I always found it funny that supposedly cutting edge high tech VC’s wanted you nearby when we had all the tools to base anywhere in the world. Seemed like they were unnecessarily limiting deal potential. Same thing with engineers. Now that remote work has accelerated into the mainstream, there is zero reason to base in CA, and many reasons to go elsewhere. Also, the CA of today is very different from the one that cradled the computing industry.

johnebgd 5y ago
CA still has large and growing industries that could be great clients. I agree there is zero reason to focus on engineering talent in CA but depending on your company it might make a lot of sense to build with a sales team in CA.
imnotreallynew 5y ago
Do others also feel this way? I moved to San Francisco a few years ago with the sole goal of starting a tech company. The “cushiness” of my well paid day job has made me a bit lazy in that regard, but it’s still the goal. However, I’ve become extremely disenchanted with the city and state, so the idea that tech startup == San Francisco is the only thing keeping me here.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  You likely want connections that you can only develop there, but once you actually start, VCs don't care where you, just who you are and who can vouch for you.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  FWIW I'm working on a tech startup far away from SF, so it's possible. However we're arguably not a startup since we're not really engineered for hypergrowth as much as slowly and methodically building a self-funded, profitable product company. As such issues like raising funding and hiring quickly are not things we're concerned with, which might be why we're doing fine outside of SF. When we do hire it's 100% remote so our location isn't hurting us in that regard. We feel like this is the best choice for our company as we retain 100% ownership and can focus on a straightforward business model of selling people a product that solves their problem at a fair price. Arguably the possible upside would be higher if we tried to go the VC route and get huge fast, but then the potential downside goes up as well. This way we're working ourselves into what amount to incredibly high paying jobs while also owning the asset that is the company.

yuy910616 5y ago

It seems to me, from reading the charts, that it still follows power law distribution, just with different cities. In other words, the labor dynamic that creates super star cities are still very much in place, just with new cities. Is that a fair reading? Also, tangentially, what statistics should I calculate if I want to measure how "concentrated" the distribution is? The first thing that comes to mind is Gini coef, does that apply here or is there something else? The question I'm trying to answer is if the jobs are more dispersed among different cities or concentrated - assuming the cities themselves don't matter.

ghaff 5y ago
Well, city size (or really metro size presumably) follows some sort of power law-ish distribution in general. So, if you look at tech employers who historically mostly hired people from certain regions on the West Coast and see where they're hiring today, it's not surprising that they'd tend to cluster around larger metros given that's where a lot of people are. (Or at least there are more people in X large metros than there are in X arbitrarily-chosen smaller towns and cities.) I'm guessing to study concentration more broadly you really want to study a broader distribution of companies. I'm not sure that looking primarily at CA outflows for future job positions is necessarily an unbiased look at tech job distribution more broadly (and really not just tech jobs but employment at large West Coast tech companies in general).

ramesh31 5y ago

Too bad the interview process is such a nightmare. It's literally given me PTSD at this point. I'd love to try out a new opportunity, but the thought of that nightmare process leaves me grateful and content where I'm at. I've also noticed a lot of rising credentialism in the industry. BS CS is now listed on practically every job posting. With the massive rise in CS grads in the US I truly don't know how a self taught dev like myself could even get a shot at a junior role anymore.

mathattack 5y ago
It’s getting tougher for the first job but not for the 2nd, where word of mouth (a strong referral from a colleague who worked with you) carries much more weight than resume. My understanding is the Googles of the world are de-emphasizing degrees but they can’t hire everyone. And you have to pass their technical interview.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >It’s getting tougher for the first job but not for the 2nd, where word of mouth (a strong referral from a colleague who worked with you) carries much more weight than resume. I've gotten plenty of employee referrals in the past because people I've worked with know I'm a solid developer, but honestly I just politely refuse them at this point. Every single time it happens, the company just drops you straight into the standard interview pipeline with zero benefit other than perhaps skipping a recruiter phone call. And when I'm inevitably not able to solve some random whiteboard problem or whatever, and I get rejected, it makes the friendship weird from then on.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    There are basically two kinds of referrals: The first is employees put the names of people they know and have maybe worked with a bit into the system attached to an open position with the hope, in part, that they'll get a referral bonus down the road. That's going to basically go through the regular process. When I've gotten a job directly or indirectly through someone I knew, it's been through people I've worked with in the past and were usually in a position to at least influence the hiring. I'm not sure any of those jobs (which I've just had a few of) was even against a posted position.

madengr 5y ago

The definition of “tech” keep expanding. Amazon is a retail company, not tech. Walmart would be “tech” too. Loan processing is not tech, neither id advertising (all social media companies). I’m a traditional EE, and don’t want to be associated with “tech” even though I actually work in technology.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Good luck finding anything but 4th rate betacuck tax cattle in USA.

binarynate 5y ago

What are some of the most underrated US cities for tech? One that comes to my mind is Nashville. It seems to have a considerable tech scene, the music scene is great, and it's much more affordable than, say, Austin.

ghaff 5y ago
I suppose it depends what you mean by "for tech." If it's to work in tech locally, the situation with smaller cities is likely to be mostly a function of what jobs are available there. And note that many tech employers--indeed most until fairly recently--were in office parks not downtown. If you have more flexibility with remote work, there are a ton of smaller cities that many people like. You mentioned Nashville. Some others that come to mind are Raleigh, Minneapolis, Portsmouth NH, Portland ME... The one caveat I would make with a number of these cities is that the walkable (gentrified) downtown is often pretty small so it's really a very different experience from living/working in a large city.
- packetlost 5y ago
  Can confirm. Live in Madison, WI. People here call it a "city" and "tech hub" but the downtown is like 3 square blocks and there's like half a dozen """tech""" companies in the area and maybe twice as many small startups. lol
  - ghaff 5y ago
    A ton of college towns are like that. The college/uni does bring some degree of "culture" and other entertainment and spur some tech-related companies you wouldn't find in an equivalently-sized place that didn't have a college attached, but the options are limited. I worked in downtown Nashua NH for a number of years. The downtown was actually quite nice. On the river, quite a few restaurants, some shops, etc. But yeah, outside of a few blocks adjacent to maybe 5 or 6 blocks of Main Street, things either started to get sketchy or just started to blend into the strip mall and industrial parks south of town. Raleigh, where I sometimes travel to because we have a big office there, is very similar.