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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.
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
Anyone who has lived and worked in the Bay Area knows a lot of people living in San jose and working in San Francisco, vice versa, or anything in between. The fact that a great deal of people living in the so called Bay Area would consider working in any other part of the Bay Area makes it, by definition, a single job market, which is the focus of this study.
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
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.