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New York Falls and Seattle Rises on 'America's Top Tech Cities' List (geekwire.com)
CRBE has released their annual list of the top tech cities in the U.S., analyzing 13 metrics (including salaries and housing costs) to "gauge the competitive advantage of markets and their ability to attract, grow and retain tech-talent pools." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes an article from Geekwire:
Seattle is the third best tech market in North America, trailing only the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington D.C.... Seattle passed New York for third this year on the back of a growing, well-paid and well-educated class of tech employees and a strong roster of big companies...with New York and Austin rounding out the top five.
The report shows a big divide in Seattle between a prosperous tech community and everyone else. Tech workers in Seattle make $110,999 on average, and their wages have increased close to 20 percent since 2010... The 177,380 people who work in other professional fields like finance, sales and marketing make an average of $57,603 per year and their wages have only increased 6.3 percent since 2010. During that same time period, apartment rents increased 39 percent to an average of $1,619 a month.
San Francisco had the highest annual salary for tech workers -- $123,921 -- followed by Seattle, which also had the highest percentage of workers with at least a bachelor's degree -- 59%. And there's also an interesting second list of the top small tech markets, which is led by Columbus, Ohio followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon.
The report shows a big divide in Seattle between a prosperous tech community and everyone else. Tech workers in Seattle make $110,999 on average, and their wages have increased close to 20 percent since 2010... The 177,380 people who work in other professional fields like finance, sales and marketing make an average of $57,603 per year and their wages have only increased 6.3 percent since 2010. During that same time period, apartment rents increased 39 percent to an average of $1,619 a month.
San Francisco had the highest annual salary for tech workers -- $123,921 -- followed by Seattle, which also had the highest percentage of workers with at least a bachelor's degree -- 59%. And there's also an interesting second list of the top small tech markets, which is led by Columbus, Ohio followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon.
Anyone who has lived and worked in the Bay Area knows: "San Francisco" and "Silicon Valley" (Mountain View/Sunnyvale) and "San Jose" and "East Bay" are very different, very distinct markets. Heck, we're talking about an area the size of Rhode Island; why wouldn't they be distinct? But oh so many studies, done by so-called professionals, confuses the areas, or mashes them together.
i suppose 50s there were similar lists of america's top industrial cities.
its a nasty (rather than celebratory) thing when a city/country is not economically diversified.
Of course the big news in Portland is that Intel is and will layoff well over 1,000 workers. It is unclear that this city with a metro population of 2 million has the high paying tech job to absorb that loss. Expecially in market when you need $1500 a month just for rent.
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Doesn't Seattle have, like, no broadband? How does a city where the average resident might as well be on dialup become one of the hottest tech cities?
attle. I'm sick of being stuck with dial-up at home and shared ISDN lines at work because of the Director's Rules.
You and me both. I had a connection more than a hundred times faster fifteen years ago when I lived in rural Georgia.
Do what I did. I pay about $450 per month for a T1 to my condo and resell wireless connections to my neighbors. My net cost is less tha $200 per month for more than a full Mbps.
What's with all the whining about no fast internet in Seattle? I get a gigabit to my apartment for pretty cheap.
When you factor cost of living, 124,000USD in San Francisco is not that much. Rents are ridiculously high in SF. I dont know about other cities in the states but while I love that city, it would not be my first relocation choice based on expenses.
Hey stupid heads, why was this insightful post modded down? Mod it up!
Can you pay $3,000 every month to share a closet with three other people?
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Consistently, the top cities for I.T. jobs/careers also have some of the highest costs of living in the nation. And often, the average salaries paid in those "top cities" are really pretty sub-par for the areas. (Lots of I.T. job availability also means a lot of competition for openings, as people migrate there from all over the country who have those skills.)
As someone who moved to the DC area for an I.T. job, let me tell you -- when you factor in the combo of housing prices at LEAST double to triple what they were in the midwest (whether you're buying or renting) and the commuting challenges up here? I'd advise any of my mid-western friends in I.T. to stay where they are, vs. moving up to this part of the country. Exception would be some kind of sweet government contractor position guaranteeing you 4x your current salary or more.
In my own case, I was simply burnt out and tired of living and working in the same city I grew up in. I was ready to relocate someplace else because 40 years or so in the same city was enough for me, period. The DC area was the opportunity that kind of fell into my lap and I got to work for a firm where 2 of my friends already had a job. So I packed up and went for it. There's not a week that goes by, 4 years later, that I haven't questioned if all of this was really such a good idea. But my wife and I scraped and scratched out a living that's now pretty equivalent to what we had before. We're "doing okay" by most standards.
I'm just saying -- these surveys of "best places to work" are often only looking at a few isolated factors, and they don't REALLY help you make good decisions.
It's too crowded already. There is nowhere to park. The rents are rising sky high. The traffic is terrible. The weather is horrible. Your big tech money doesn't really go that far. You will never be able to afford a house.
Don't move here.
sf is constrained by building space... natural for seattle to come in 2nd and keep growing
Seattle misery: HUGE problems with traffic. New construction makes the traffic worse. Amazon and Microsoft abusing employees. Shockingly slow internet connections.
... CenturyLink (CTL) customers trying to access particular sites from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. will have unbearably slow speeds."
Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (February 23, 2014)
Microsoft: Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book (May 23, 2012)
Traffic: Seattle one of the worst U.S. cities for traffic congestion, tied with NYC (March 31, 2015) Quote: "An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic may not sound like much, but when it adds up over a year it becomes 89 hours." (Whoever wrote that must be accustomed to Seattle misery. An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic sounds HORRIBLE.)
Slow internet: Many areas of Seattle have poor internet connections. See the article, These places have the slowest Internet in the country. (June 25, 2015) Quote: "... Seattle
Seattle traffic is terrible enough as it is.
Nothing like going 5mph max on I-5.
From the shit of infants rises the stench of soiled diapers.
Wait, when the fuck was NYC ever a tech capital?
Other than DICE, who realized their mistake with Slashdot, who the fuck even has a New York orifice?
I nearly got lured to Seattle by Amazon, but balked when I realized how much higher the cost of living was, especially in contrast to the only slightly higher salaries. For every dollar they put in your pocket, the location takes three back out. The famous tech places like SF, NYC, DC and Seattle are a huge trap.
To rent a 4-5 bed house in Tampa is about the same as renting a shoebox sized studio near the amazon campus. There's really not much overlap between the price ranges for housing costs. If you're willing to commute an hour and a half in Seattle or San Jose or NYC or SF, you can maybe get houses that cost under half a million. That same commute here gets you 50k houses.
I had a similar experience coming from CA to FL in the first place- the salaries are definitely higher in CA, but the cost of living is astronomical by comparison. When I was in my early 20s, fresh out of college, getting a 50% bump in salary to move to CA seemed awesome... and then I realized I was getting a 300% bump in rent to go along with it. And state income tax. And federal AMT. And CA state AMT. When I moved back out of CA after a few years of salary gains, I took a 20k/year salary cut but somehow ended up holding on to an extra 2-3k a month in savings.
A lot of people move to the big tech hubs for a few years and burn out their finances trying to survive there. It's seems like you're doing great, but a few months being unemployed (which happens from time to time in any career) can wipe out even significant amounts of savings. The only people I've seen survive in those places long term have family there from before those places got expensive (ie, free place to crash and lots of real estate equity) or they got lucky and struck gold from an IPO. Everyone else is just trying to get rich before they go broke.
How fucking stupid. CBRE is a commercial real estate firm. Who gives a shit what they say. Look at the cities they have the biggest presence in. Big fucking surprise, Slashdot retards.
10-20 minute commute? check
Can get through the airport quick? check
Affordable housing? check
Clean air? check
Lack of traffic? check
Spokane, Yakima, Tri-Cities are not bad at all... Unless you can't handle someone calling you out for being a moron, regardless of political leanings.
I'm not surprised to see Nashville listed as a "momentum market" in this report, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there (I lived there for 9 years before relocating in 2014) and for 20-somethings it's an exciting and affordable place to live.
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I've been to that big New York Falls, but don't know exactly what do they mean by the Seattle Rises. Is some kind of known mountain range?
Anyway, nice to see that natural spaces get to make the list of top ten tech cities.Way to go, Nature!
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I had a connection more than a hundred times faster fifteen years ago when I lived in rural Georgia.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a shotgun firing flash drives?
Working and living in those places still puts you ahead in absolute terms if you invest your earnings in non-depreciating assets. The cost of housing skews much higher in those places than typically necessary material goods (cars, home appliances, etc). Assuming you invest your money well in DC, that should put you in a good position to retire in the midwest and/or leave a better inheritance (in absolute terms) for your kids some day should you so choose.
I left a "rising" Seattle in 2012 because it was getting too expensive for me or anyone who didn't have a top 10 percentile income to live there. In Seattle's case, its because Bezos wants to put virtually all Amazon's decent paying jobs there, leaving the miserably paying work for the rest of the country.
Even those who can manage to stay are getting screwed. The city's wealthy developers (looking at you Paul Allen), want to grab all the money from selling or renting to these new high-income people, particularly in the South Lake Union area. As a result, the City of Seattle, ever eager to please its billionaires, are trying to foist less expensive housing out in neighborhoods by waiving rules about sufficient housing. That'll wreck parking in neighborhoods and raise crime rates.
There's even a nasty little game going on with the city's traffic. An ideology called 'traffic calming' is making the city's traffic flow worse and worse, moving it from the 7th worst in the country to 6th. And who benefits from that? Would you believe those billionaire real estate developers (i.e. Paul Allen) who own the housing within walking distance of Amazon's new skyscrapers.
Yeah, costs were one reason I left. But the politics in a city run by and for billionaire real estate developers was the larger reason. Before I left, I warned friends. "Look around and enjoy Seatle now, because you're looking at the Detroit of 2050." Detroit, if you know its history also run for the city's very rich, in that case the Big Three automakers. Abusing the city's citizens, lead to a flight that destroyed the city's tax base.
I'm just saying -- these surveys of "best places to work" are often only looking at a few isolated factors, and they don't REALLY help you make good decisions.
Actually, it's worse — these surveys shit up towns. When people hear there's lots of work there, they go there looking for work, and the result is that the job market gets clogged with seekers and there's thousands of applications for every position. The exact same thing happens when a big magazine publishes a survey of the best cities to live in. They just fucked Petaluma, CA with one of those recently. We loved that town, but it became well known and now driving and parking is just a fuckfest, and not in a good way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It AMAZES me how dis-functional people often are when they are abused.
I don't live in Seattle, or anywhere near.
Absolutely. I get tired of explaining this to people who say things like "why don't you work in a place with a lower cost of living?" (I live in the DC area as well).
The cost of things like your kids' college educations or flights or any other big ticket items don't magically get lower if you live in a lower cost of living place. To afford those you need quantitatively more money. So I do exactly what you say, live frugally and try to invest wisely.
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Guilty til proven innocent!
My net cost is less tha $200 per month for more than a full Mbps.
What a deal! For fuck's sake, no one in a major US city should be happy with "a full Mbps" and especially not anyone in a supposed tech hotbed. There are people in rural Montana with faster internet...
The same thing happened to the town I live in. It got some national attention 8 years ago and the population nearly doubled in that time. It went from a cool/funky/nice place to live to constant traffic, high house prices, and all the old families leaving due to the influx of rich people from elsewhere.