Roughly a year after the nation began to lock down against the threat of COVID-19, businesses are figuring out how to safely reopen again, and some metro areas are bouncing back faster than others. Given all that, which cities have seen the highest rates of technologist hiring?
According to Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country, New York City is the metro area with the greatest number of technology jobs over the past 90 days, followed by Chicago and Atlanta. San Francisco, meanwhile, is drifting around in fourth place, with one of the major parts of Silicon Valley, San Jose, in 15th place. More on the significance of those rankings in a moment; in the meantime, check out the full chart:
New York City’s aggressive hiring spree should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been tracking the rise and fall of technologist employment over the past 12 months. Late last year, news broke that some of the biggest names in tech—including Apple, Amazon, and Facebook—were securing huge amounts of office space in Manhattan’s Midtown, in addition to hiring thousands of new employees.
“The big takeaway here is that New York will always be a tech hub,” William Floyd, director of external affairs for Google’s New York offices, told the New York Times in October 2020.
Although New York City was hit hard early in the pandemic, with an accompanying rise in layoffs (particularly among startups), the city is a center for various industries—most notably finance and medicine—that always have a need for technologists. That, combined with Big Tech’s investment in office space and employees, is helping to drive the hiring spike.
That San Francisco and Silicon Valley haven’t experienced the same kind of hiring momentum is a potentially interesting twist. For many months, some of the region’s largest employers—including Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter—have broadcast how they’ll let their employees work remotely from now on, if they don’t want to come back into an office. Combine that with survey data suggesting that many technologists are fleeing Silicon Valley for metro areas with a lower cost of living, and you might be safe in suggesting that the region faces some challenges in retaining technologists.
However, it may take months (or even years) for these hiring and moving trends to fully play out. In the meantime, there are several areas around the country where technologist hiring seems robust, which is a positive development.
