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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.
Could an employee live in a central location and reasonably commute to any of the three? (Honest question; I've never lived there.) If so, then it makes sense to treat them as a single employment market.
Not really. Your commute will be hellish and your housing costs won't be that much lower because you're not the first person to come up with this idea.
Seattle is turning into the same kind of over-priced shithole as Silicon Valley. Yuppies clog the city holding their Starbucks cup as if it was the Holy Grail.
Too many people, too many cars, housing is very expensive and is going up daily, infrastructure is overwhelmed and underfunded. As a result, homeless people are everywhere. You have to move out to one of the meth-head dumps like Sultan or Monroe or Lake Stevens to find remotely affordable housing or a house under $400K. That might sound affordable but $400K only buys you a rat-infested fixer-upper. Make sure you buy yourself a top-of-the-line alarm system because the bicycle-pedaling meth-heads that roam your neighborhood will steal anything not nailed down or locked up.
The tech-pricks who work for companies like Amazon and Microsoft think their shit don't stink. They make a modest living wage but not enough to really stand out and they're all mortgaged to the hilt. They get their ego fulfillment from their employer, as if working for Microsoft or Amazon is a great achievement and something to brag about. Mostly they're just insufferable pricks.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...