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Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

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Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#81
post #72
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toronto has got to be the worst deal on that list in terms of salary vs cost of living.

I grew up in Toronto, and I'm not sure. There are people in SF who make 110k a year, but pay 3000/month for a studio apartment.

Those people would be considered bad with money. You can definitely have way better quality of life in San Francisco and 110k total comp is kind of on the low side (at that point you would probably be making 60k in Toronto though).

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#82

Reasons 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.

Re. some of those: Seattle also has the highest water bills in the nation (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/rain-soaked-se...)

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#83
post #56

Reasons 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.

Also: no income tax. If it's introduced, people will leave in massive droves, because as nice as those things are, 6 months of rain every year is not everyone's cup of tea

The rain's not so bad. The 9 months of grey is.

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#84

Reasons 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.

Traffic 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.

Which is utterly astounding to me. The traffic was beyond atrocious when I left in 2002. The Bay Area was a significant upgrade in terms of traffic.

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#85

Move 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.

Mind sharing more?

Hot as hell. More humid than hell half the time, oddly dry the other half.

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#86

Disappointed 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.

> 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-N...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/data/xg-tabl...

[3] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/n...

[4] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_industri...

[5] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_occupati...

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#87
post #66

Disappointed 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.

Yeah, 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.

And I see that your handle is the zip code for River North. Well played.

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#88
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlanta is the center of tech ambitions for the southeast. It has a lot of Fortune 500 company headquarters - Turner Broadcasting with 18+ major online brands, Home Depot, Lowe's, etc. Yahoo and Google had offices. There are also a lot of small satellite consulting firms. Cost of housing is much lower, though traffic is bad as well. It's a nice green city, but Venture funding is low, so it depends on your ambitions.

I'd be very cautious about Atlanta. Outside of Google, many of the companies there are wanting to pay salaries I'd consider substantially below market (even including COLA) compared to the other hubs. That includes those fortune 500 companies (a couple of whom had internal recruiters bail when I mentioned my current salary + the COLA number). Cutting your real estate costs by $12-15k goes a long way but it doesn't ma…

What companies did you look at and what do you consider market rate? You might consider Silly Valley salaries to be market rate but they're not. In fact those rates are what the top 1% of coders make if they're lucky. I would expect Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and other competitive technology companies to pay those rates but market rate is going to be 60-180k. There are tons and tons of jobs paying in that range from less cool tech companies like NCR, AT&T, Borland (Micro whatever), and IBM. There are also tons of other companies headquartered in Atlanta willing to pay those rates like Rubbermaid, CTX (trains), Coca Cola, and Bank of America. There are also a lot of companies that tend to pay below market rate for coders because of the cool factor of working for them like the TV and Film companies.

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#89
post #12

I 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-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 Was…

As a former Baltimore resident, what exactly makes you think Baltimore fails the sniff test? For example, Johns Hopkins University is IIRC the highest-funded research-focused university in the USA. (Edit - adding link to support above : Johns Hopkins leads U.S. universities in research spending for 37th consecutive year : https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/12/07/research-spending-hopkins-nsf... )

Other cities on the list have ~half the research spending, plus ALSO large tech industries.

Re: Higher-paid, faster-growing tech jobs are concentrating in 8 US hubs

#90
post #35
post #12

I 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-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 Was…

Atlanta is the center of tech ambitions for the southeast. It has a lot of Fortune 500 company headquarters - Turner Broadcasting with 18+ major online brands, Home Depot, Lowe's, etc. Yahoo and Google had offices. There are also a lot of small satellite consulting firms. Cost of housing is much lower, though traffic is bad as well. It's a nice green city, but Venture funding is low, so it depends on your ambitions.

> ambitions

vs

> had offices

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