7 ms·

How Big Is The NYC Tech Sector?

45 points by cwan 13y ago

jamesdutc 13y ago
I live in NYC, and I've seen the tech community grow pretty quickly over the past few years. I run a meetup group - NYC Python: http://www.nycpython.com/ http://www.nycpython.com/ - and the number of events, attendees, companies, and conferences dedicated to just Python has grown substantially since I started getting involved a few years back.
morgante 13y ago
The big confusion is whether we're trying to measure the "tech sector" or the "startup sector." The former is likely a superset of the latter, and the latter possibly includes companies which aren't necessarily in the former. Should I be counted as part of the NYC tech sector? I'm working in a technical role at a media startup. Is that more or less techy than an office manager at a tech startup? Purely anecdotally, the tech scene in NYC still feels extremely intimate. It's easy to know/recognize a lot of people at any tech event.
nrivadeneira 13y ago
Speaking from my own experience, the NYC startup community is large and very active. I'm hoping this growth continues after we get a new mayor in.
- wikiburner 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you worried De Blasio will negatively impact the startup sector?
  - nrivadeneira 13y ago
    I'm saying that Mayor Bloomberg has been highly proactive in pushing the tech and startup sector forward. It would be hard to deny that he's partially responsible for fostering the growth that's occurred in NYC. I don't know that the next mayor will be quite as bullish on tech as Bloomberg was. Also, I'm suggesting there may be a reduction in growth, not a decline. I wouldn't necessarily call a reduction in growth a 'negative impact' - just less of a positive impact.
segmondy 13y ago
Instead of asking how big is the sector? I believe the real question should be, How joined/fragmented is it? I won't call it a problem, but the difference between CA and other places is that other places are much fragmented and disjointed. NYC tech sector might be large, but it doesn't have that CA appeal because everyone is everywhere. If they were all brought together into the same region it would bubble up like Silicon Valley.
- jimm 13y ago
  Pshaw! I don't know how you define "disjointed", but Manhattan is around 22 square miles large, and most of the tech sector is concentrated in the southern half. There are multiple meet-ups and user groups meeting pretty much every night.
- jasonwocky 13y ago
  Fragmented in what way? Physically? B/C NYC isn't that big, and has outstanding transit. My assumption is that NYC tech is actually less physically fragmented than SV tech.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Er... The Bay Area's tech scene stretches all the way from San Francisco down to San Jose (and a bit beyond, even). That's a 50 mile drive all by itself. I recall when living in SF that the SF tech scene and SV tech scene were eerily separate because of the city/suburb divide. It's far from unified. Compare with the tech scene in NYC which is almost entirely based in Manhattan - a 5-mile stretch of it no less (from Bowling Green up to 59th St), that you can traverse by train or cab in a matter of 20-25 minutes. If pure concentration of people/companies is the X-factor, NYC should've trounced California by now :P
michaelochurch 13y ago
I lived there for 7 years. New York is a great place in general, but I wouldn't recommend its tech scene. The Meetups are of high quality (in general) because there are so many people, but most of the people at <Cool Technology X> meetups don't get to use X in their day jobs. The VC-funded startups are thick on quantity but dogshit (on average) for quality. Most of the talented people move to finance (or leave NYC) after 30 because the startup scene is so awful: most of the founders are well-connected wankbaskets, not real technologists.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > The Meetups are of high quality (in general) because there are so many people, but most of the people at <Cool Technology X> meetups don't get to use X in their day jobs. Clearly you had the misfortune of going to the wrong meetups. I haven't felt that way about any of the Meetups I attend, except for very obscure or emerging technologies (such as Haskell or Go - which I think is true almost everywhere). > The VC-funded startups are thick on quantity but dogshit (on average) for quality. Most of the talented people move to finance (or leave NYC) after 30 because the startup scene is so awful: most of the founders are well-connected wankbaskets, not real technologists. I'm sorry you feel that way. That has not been my experience in the slightest. Perhaps you were in NYC at the wrong time? Things have changed dramatically (for the better) since 2009/2010 or so.
  - carterschonwald 13y ago
    A number of the organizers for the NYC Haskell meetup have businesses whose stacks are full Haskell.
    - chimeracoder 13y ago
      As I typed that, I thought, "I wonder how long it will be before Carter corrects me on the Haskell comment". :)
      - carterschonwald 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mathattack 13y ago
One thing that makes counting tough is that in NYC there isn't a hard divide between tech and non-tech, and many firms support niche verticals. Rather than general purpose Big Data companies, we have Big Data for Media, or Big Data for Finance. The industries supported also wind up looking very technical. Is an exchange a place where stocks are traded, or a technology where stocks are traded? It's looking more like the latter. Are digital media companies part of media, or part of technology? For those into applied technology, this is the beauty of the NYC tech scene. Perhaps it's a little less glamorous for researchers.
sethbannon 13y ago
It doesn't seem like "positions that require 'advanced tech sklls'" is the right measure for the size of the NYC tech sector. Surely Foursquare's office manager is a part of NYC's tech sector, but their job likely doesn't require "advanced tech skills".
free652 13y ago
NYC's financial industry pays well for tech jobs, I'd guess more people get a nice 9-5 job with a good salary vs a startup job with a lot of pressure.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > I'd guess more people get a nice 9-5 job with a good salary vs a startup job with a lot of pressure. NYC financial jobs are not 9-5 or without a lot of pressure. For any job that you're likely to get in your 20s, NYC finance jobs pay worse, have far longer hours, and are much more high-pressure. Beyond your 20s, it varies greatly by level of seniority, so it gets tougher to compare, but the high-paying jobs still require very long hours.
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    I've been working 12+ hour days and working more at home after work for the past 3 months and I work at a bank. It's ridiculous. It's not low pressure in the slightest.
  - dev_jim 13y ago
    > For any job that you're likely to get in your 20s, NYC finance jobs pay worse, have far longer hours, and are much more high-pressure. If you're working in the front office then your pay is going to be a multiple of a startup job. And it's going to be significantly higher then any established company in the area (Amazon, Facebook, Google). A good rule of thumb is your base will be similar what established companies pay and your bonus is all gravy. Pressure and hours vary by firm. It's hard to generalize.
    - bigbang 13y ago
      I'm not sure how much bonuses software engineers get. I've heard it's great for bankers, traders etc. But do software engineers(who work on building infra/tools, not the kind who write trading algos) get paid good bonuses as well? By good I mean 30%+
lnanek2 13y ago
As someone on both coasts often, NYC seems to have many fewer tech events. I might get a hackathon or two a month in NYC, but in SF/SV sometimes there are 7 in a single weekend and it is rare to have a weekend without one. The prizes are much better too. A 5k purse is normal, but they often go up to 40k or even 850k investment for the top two with the upcoming LAUNCH hackathon. The conference situation is the same. You get much bigger, much more frequent, with many more companies in SF/SV. If you are looking to do business development or just find a job, your chances are much better. I'm not saying NYC is bad, it has something. The something it has is just much less than the tech center of the country.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  As someone based in NYC (since 1996) but debating a move to SF, I'd agree. I was here through the .com boom and used to attend NYNMA events (remember those?), but NYC has never really been tech startup-oriented in the way SF is. They've tried, what with billing it as 'Silicon Alley' and all, but it never really seemed to take hold. And the big tech events where they'd have Bloomberg as a keynote and then do a handful of tech demos... the demos would be things that we'd seen before coming out of SF and seemed like copycat products. A big part of it is the culture here. If you tell someone in NYC that you're bootstrapping a startup out of your living room, the response is 'oh, so you're unemployed'. Do the same in a conversation in SF and people start talking about who might be a good fit for you to meet. So, I wouldn't recommend starting a tech company here. Don't get me wrong, NYC is a great place for tech. But I'm talking about tech in service to financial services institutions. So, web development, financial software, etc. And mostly around Microsoft tech (ASP.NET, SQL nowadays). I've worked at corporate banks, I've built ecommerce systems, I've built events management systems. They've paid the bills. But the dream change-the-world startup idea? It's just not part of the culture here. Fashion? Absolutely. Food? Sure. Music? Maybe. But tech that's not gonna be a financial services play? I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
  - rexreed 13y ago
    Where's a good place to find (and list) tech events that happen in NYC?
HaloZero 13y ago
Does anybody have a number on the San Francisco / Silicon Valley / Austin / Seattle tech sectors in comparison?

45 points by cwan 13y ago

I live in NYC, and I've seen the tech community grow pretty quickly over the past few years. I run a meetup group - NYC Python: http://www.nycpython.com/ http://www.nycpython.com/ - and the number of events, attendees, companies, and conferences dedicated to just Python has grown substantially since I started getting involved a few years back.

morgante 13y ago

The big confusion is whether we're trying to measure the "tech sector" or the "startup sector." The former is likely a superset of the latter, and the latter possibly includes companies which aren't necessarily in the former. Should I be counted as part of the NYC tech sector? I'm working in a technical role at a media startup. Is that more or less techy than an office manager at a tech startup? Purely anecdotally, the tech scene in NYC still feels extremely intimate. It's easy to know/recognize a lot of people at any tech event.

nrivadeneira 13y ago

Speaking from my own experience, the NYC startup community is large and very active. I'm hoping this growth continues after we get a new mayor in.

wikiburner 13y ago
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you worried De Blasio will negatively impact the startup sector?
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  I'm saying that Mayor Bloomberg has been highly proactive in pushing the tech and startup sector forward. It would be hard to deny that he's partially responsible for fostering the growth that's occurred in NYC. I don't know that the next mayor will be quite as bullish on tech as Bloomberg was. Also, I'm suggesting there may be a reduction in growth, not a decline. I wouldn't necessarily call a reduction in growth a 'negative impact' - just less of a positive impact.

segmondy 13y ago

Instead of asking how big is the sector? I believe the real question should be, How joined/fragmented is it? I won't call it a problem, but the difference between CA and other places is that other places are much fragmented and disjointed. NYC tech sector might be large, but it doesn't have that CA appeal because everyone is everywhere. If they were all brought together into the same region it would bubble up like Silicon Valley.

jimm 13y ago
Pshaw! I don't know how you define "disjointed", but Manhattan is around 22 square miles large, and most of the tech sector is concentrated in the southern half. There are multiple meet-ups and user groups meeting pretty much every night.
jasonwocky 13y ago
Fragmented in what way? Physically? B/C NYC isn't that big, and has outstanding transit. My assumption is that NYC tech is actually less physically fragmented than SV tech.
potatolicious 13y ago
Er... The Bay Area's tech scene stretches all the way from San Francisco down to San Jose (and a bit beyond, even). That's a 50 mile drive all by itself. I recall when living in SF that the SF tech scene and SV tech scene were eerily separate because of the city/suburb divide. It's far from unified. Compare with the tech scene in NYC which is almost entirely based in Manhattan - a 5-mile stretch of it no less (from Bowling Green up to 59th St), that you can traverse by train or cab in a matter of 20-25 minutes. If pure concentration of people/companies is the X-factor, NYC should've trounced California by now :P

michaelochurch 13y ago

I lived there for 7 years. New York is a great place in general, but I wouldn't recommend its tech scene. The Meetups are of high quality (in general) because there are so many people, but most of the people at <Cool Technology X> meetups don't get to use X in their day jobs. The VC-funded startups are thick on quantity but dogshit (on average) for quality. Most of the talented people move to finance (or leave NYC) after 30 because the startup scene is so awful: most of the founders are well-connected wankbaskets, not real technologists.

chimeracoder 13y ago
> The Meetups are of high quality (in general) because there are so many people, but most of the people at <Cool Technology X> meetups don't get to use X in their day jobs. Clearly you had the misfortune of going to the wrong meetups. I haven't felt that way about any of the Meetups I attend, except for very obscure or emerging technologies (such as Haskell or Go - which I think is true almost everywhere). > The VC-funded startups are thick on quantity but dogshit (on average) for quality. Most of the talented people move to finance (or leave NYC) after 30 because the startup scene is so awful: most of the founders are well-connected wankbaskets, not real technologists. I'm sorry you feel that way. That has not been my experience in the slightest. Perhaps you were in NYC at the wrong time? Things have changed dramatically (for the better) since 2009/2010 or so.
- carterschonwald 13y ago
  A number of the organizers for the NYC Haskell meetup have businesses whose stacks are full Haskell.
  - chimeracoder 13y ago
    As I typed that, I thought, "I wonder how long it will be before Carter corrects me on the Haskell comment". :)
    - carterschonwald 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mathattack 13y ago

One thing that makes counting tough is that in NYC there isn't a hard divide between tech and non-tech, and many firms support niche verticals. Rather than general purpose Big Data companies, we have Big Data for Media, or Big Data for Finance. The industries supported also wind up looking very technical. Is an exchange a place where stocks are traded, or a technology where stocks are traded? It's looking more like the latter. Are digital media companies part of media, or part of technology? For those into applied technology, this is the beauty of the NYC tech scene. Perhaps it's a little less glamorous for researchers.

sethbannon 13y ago

It doesn't seem like "positions that require 'advanced tech sklls'" is the right measure for the size of the NYC tech sector. Surely Foursquare's office manager is a part of NYC's tech sector, but their job likely doesn't require "advanced tech skills".

free652 13y ago

NYC's financial industry pays well for tech jobs, I'd guess more people get a nice 9-5 job with a good salary vs a startup job with a lot of pressure.

chimeracoder 13y ago
> I'd guess more people get a nice 9-5 job with a good salary vs a startup job with a lot of pressure. NYC financial jobs are not 9-5 or without a lot of pressure. For any job that you're likely to get in your 20s, NYC finance jobs pay worse, have far longer hours, and are much more high-pressure. Beyond your 20s, it varies greatly by level of seniority, so it gets tougher to compare, but the high-paying jobs still require very long hours.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  I've been working 12+ hour days and working more at home after work for the past 3 months and I work at a bank. It's ridiculous. It's not low pressure in the slightest.
- dev_jim 13y ago
  > For any job that you're likely to get in your 20s, NYC finance jobs pay worse, have far longer hours, and are much more high-pressure. If you're working in the front office then your pay is going to be a multiple of a startup job. And it's going to be significantly higher then any established company in the area (Amazon, Facebook, Google). A good rule of thumb is your base will be similar what established companies pay and your bonus is all gravy. Pressure and hours vary by firm. It's hard to generalize.
  - bigbang 13y ago
    I'm not sure how much bonuses software engineers get. I've heard it's great for bankers, traders etc. But do software engineers(who work on building infra/tools, not the kind who write trading algos) get paid good bonuses as well? By good I mean 30%+

lnanek2 13y ago

As someone on both coasts often, NYC seems to have many fewer tech events. I might get a hackathon or two a month in NYC, but in SF/SV sometimes there are 7 in a single weekend and it is rare to have a weekend without one. The prizes are much better too. A 5k purse is normal, but they often go up to 40k or even 850k investment for the top two with the upcoming LAUNCH hackathon. The conference situation is the same. You get much bigger, much more frequent, with many more companies in SF/SV. If you are looking to do business development or just find a job, your chances are much better. I'm not saying NYC is bad, it has something. The something it has is just much less than the tech center of the country.

JohnTHaller 13y ago
As someone based in NYC (since 1996) but debating a move to SF, I'd agree. I was here through the .com boom and used to attend NYNMA events (remember those?), but NYC has never really been tech startup-oriented in the way SF is. They've tried, what with billing it as 'Silicon Alley' and all, but it never really seemed to take hold. And the big tech events where they'd have Bloomberg as a keynote and then do a handful of tech demos... the demos would be things that we'd seen before coming out of SF and seemed like copycat products. A big part of it is the culture here. If you tell someone in NYC that you're bootstrapping a startup out of your living room, the response is 'oh, so you're unemployed'. Do the same in a conversation in SF and people start talking about who might be a good fit for you to meet. So, I wouldn't recommend starting a tech company here. Don't get me wrong, NYC is a great place for tech. But I'm talking about tech in service to financial services institutions. So, web development, financial software, etc. And mostly around Microsoft tech (ASP.NET, SQL nowadays). I've worked at corporate banks, I've built ecommerce systems, I've built events management systems. They've paid the bills. But the dream change-the-world startup idea? It's just not part of the culture here. Fashion? Absolutely. Food? Sure. Music? Maybe. But tech that's not gonna be a financial services play? I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
- rexreed 13y ago
  Where's a good place to find (and list) tech events that happen in NYC?

HaloZero 13y ago

Does anybody have a number on the San Francisco / Silicon Valley / Austin / Seattle tech sectors in comparison?