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90% Of Software Developers Work Outside Silicon Valley (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: So much code to write, so few developers. The chronic talent shortage afflicting Silicon Valley is now all over the US -- and the developers are too.
A study by the software trade group The App Association analyzed government and private sector data to map where software developers live, and it identified 223,054 open positions around the country. It found that most developers live far away from the technology epicenter of Silicon Valley, and job openings follow a similar pattern. The upshot: Silicon Valley-style talent wars are moving away from tech hubs to smaller metro and even rural areas. Everywhere from rural Vermont to the middle of Montana is in need of programmers. "You can find places where you didn't expect software developers to be, but they are part of the local economy," said association spokesman Jonathan Godfrey in an interview. "It's pretty much everywhere."
Hooray for cheap, outsourced code monkeys!
Why would I pay $3000/month to share a ROOM with four other people making $120K when I can BUY a four bedroom house on one acre of land in the country for $825/month on half that salary anywhere between the Rocky and Appalachian mountain ranges? I'd take the boring enterprise 9-5 job at a no-name B2B service company any day of the week and enjoy my big house and yard with my kids any day of the week.
The problem with living in one of these remote places is that when the company you work for shuts down or lays you off, it's time to move.
I'm in DC Metro area, and I hate it, but I can get another job in minutes.
But there's no way I'd go to Silicon Valley. The 1000 sq' house in Sunnyvale that I grew up in is worth millions now. I could never afford to live there again.
One look at the map in TFA and this came to mind: https://xkcd.com/1138/
I guess it surprises someone that "software development" includes a whole lot of people all over the country. Databases don't query themselves, and there's always a lot of corporate tools in every line of work. Software developers make them...
from opening up shop in Fresno where the jobs are much needed.
It's pretty much everywhere BECAUSE companies are pretty much everywhere.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
10-15 years ago i made a vigorous proposal to move all software developers into silicon valley for easier categorization. Cattle ranchers would be moved into cattle valley, and car repairmen would be moved into car valley (this makes indexing and normalization easier.) problems began to mount from the start. Some people complained they "didnt want to leave" their friends and family. others answered back with "sure ill move but i dont have a job" and "when will i see my wife again, you told me she was safe." Whiners.
Anyhow once id approacher 40% of developers I noticed they didnt stack well, and many of them complained of food shortages and transportation problems. Id instituted a "no family" policy to try and remedy this, and it worked for a while, until people told me that id have to find a way to get new software developers imported. Constructing a giant tube, i used it to hydraulically propel anyone from about age 17 on who tweeted even a cursory interest in software into my silicon valley. things were working well, so long as once weekly I greased all my programmers so they could move freely in the valley and made sure to flood their cubicles with nutrition slurry once or twice a day. Then the real issues started to mount. once id hit 80% of all developers, their combined mass and pressure was enough to begin to elicit a gravitational field. Project managers now had to come with an escape velocity equation in their salary, and pizzas from neighbouring cities were delivered from 3 miles outside the valley by letting go of the pie and hoping for the best. I unfortunately had to give up on my grand vision of a valley of programmers when a rogue sysadmin at a rest stop accidentally flew into the valley and impacted it with enough force to blanket the valley in a dark cloud of coffee beans and office chairs. its now a cold, barren wasteland inhabited by a race of creatures that subsist entirely on fried meat and energy drinks. they communicate in an arcane language of 3 letter abbreviations and social justice causes.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is exactly right.
It's actually not a bad way to live if you're young. You can live in and get to know many different places, but once you start to get settled with a family, you can't be uprooting them to move somewhere else every time the company you work for gets bought, "changes strategic direction", or whatever.
It's almost like there are way more people living on the east coast than the west coast.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
A trade group for the software industry claiming there are a quarter million software jobs open around the country. Yet oddly, when people with years of experience apply for these positions they are routinely told they don't have the experience the company is looking for.
Granted, not every candidate has the experience for every position, but it seems quite odd that for all the people who apply for a position, not one is qualified. Ever. Not even remotely close qualified. Even with the thousands of new developers being sent to pasture every month from other companies.
And here we have a trade group for the software industry essentially claiming the same thing. Coincidence? You decide.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
You dont have to be from silicon valley to be interested in software, and the best developers are the ones who learned out of personal self interest. such people will be all over the place.
It makes sense that employers who need and value them will accept telecommuting in exchange for securing that talent, given the so called scarcity. (sweetening the deal, rural US wages are much lower than on the coasts.)
I really dont see what is so unusual about this statistic.
Film at 11.
Why do people think that Silcon valley is the be all and end all of software development?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
you mean a small area that has about 0.001% of the worlds population only represents 10% of a specific industry?
shit that's not fair
Breaking News!
The world doesn't revolve around California.
In related news, New York and London are also not the center of the universe. This news may come to a shock to just under 0.5% of the world's population that live in these locations.
Is anybody really surprised at this?
I'm actually surprised that as many as 10 percent work inside Silicon Valley.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I am more shocked that 10% of all developers in the US work in the Silicon Valley area. I would have guessed a sub-5% figure.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
People whose "product" is independent of where they produce it don't want to live in areas where it's insanely expensive to rent a cardboard box, let alone an apartment.
Who would have thought?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Shocked and amazed.
Seriously, I don't get it. On alternating weeks there are stories of how there is a shortage of qualified IT people in the US labor market or stories of how qualified IT people are training their H1-B replacements. WHICH IS IT???
Gee, you can't fit all 100% of programmers into a small geographic area? Some of them don't want to live there? What a crazy world we live in!
I'd bet 90% is a bit low for an estimate. Probably more like 99% of software developers work outside of Silicon Valley.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
Some of us like to have lives too!
There is a 'willing to pay for talent' shortage.
The ratio of Silicone Valley's population to the rest of the world is
2.63x10^-4. Most developers live outside of that tiny area?! I'd have been amazed if it was any other way...!
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
The chronic talent shortage afflicting Silicon Valley is now all over the US—and the developers are too.
There is no chronic shortage. It is a myth invented by tech companies to get the H1-b quota boosted.
And if any company is having a hard time recruiting people, they are doing something very wrong. My company hasn't had to use a recruiter or job board in over 8 years. HR just sends out an email to everyone saying they're looking for someone and in about two weeks, the new person starts. Somebody on the team knows someone with the skills who's looking for a new job.
Also, don't immediately discount unemployed folks. Just because they're out of work doesn't mean they're no good - especially in this day and age of people being replaced by H1-bs and offshoring.
And as far as new grads are concerned, "elite" schools don't have a monopoly on hard working smart kids.
And maybe your system isn't as cutting edge as you think it is. I've seen too many jobs where at most a BS CIS is all that's needs and many times a 2 year tech grad would be able to do a wonderful job. But they want the MIT grad to do their web page.
I've lived in a rural part of Texas for almost ten years. I left a programming job at a telecommunications company and joined a software outfit that had been out here for 25 years. I'm much happier here.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Most of _everything_ is outside Silicon Valley.
Is this news to anyone?
Isn't the real story that 10% of the worlds supply of an entire world wide industry's talent resides in an area of a few hundred square miles?
Most of programmers live on this side of Urals. China+India+Eastern Europe=~90% of global tech work force
Well, I can vouch for Houston and Dallas,Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama. LOTS of programmers.
Also - lots of high-tech ( Space, Missles, Rockets, Astronauts, Banks, Research, and more...)
And lots of jobs, that just happen to require security clearances.
Should I say "duh", or should I say "so?"
Dark Reflection
I worked in a small college town in a rural western state and it had plenty of jobs. In addition to the Uni, there were a number of software, engineering, and extractive companies in the area so when I did get laid off I had a job in a couple of weeks.
I don't give a fuck about working at Silicon Valley, I just want to smoke a better weed living in California, dude.
At least in my experience I've rarely met software engineers who actually know what they were doing, versus living on stackoverflow every day.
Let's see - study comes from a Microsoft/Google/Apple-sponsored group that asks site visitors to join the CEOs of those companies to demand that Congress cough up $250 million in K-12 computer science education funding.
Well, I can vouch for Houston and Dallas,Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama. LOTS of programmers. Also - lots of high-tech ( Space, Missles, Rockets, Astronauts, Banks, Research, and more...) And lots of jobs, that just happen to require security clearances.
San Antonio also actually has a good number of programmers.
Military & Bigger City -> More IT demand.
Lots of jobs - some with security clearances and some without.
I mean, did anyone think a huge majority of devs were located in Silicon Valley? Like, really?
90% of mechanics live outside Detroit.
after all, "computer software developer" is the most popular job in CO, UT, VA and WA.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Innovation no longer happens in The Valley. It's dead put it in bed.
over the past few years, I've noticed the big Indian body shops post jobs in weird places where no one would look for a computer job - how many of these jobs are real? - I think the Indian body shops (Indian firms which post jobs by recruiters with Indian names) are "accidentally" filing jobs under the wrong city so no one will find them and apply, proving there's a "shortage" so they can boat people in - this is one of the few times job data has been sifted through in aggregate - but are these jobs real?
"The chronic talent shortage"
There is no shortage of talented developers, just recruiting practices that don't work.
These companies don't want talent, they want sheep
However, in order to have a decent standard of living, a four-member family would need two 100K+/yr salaries.
It's still pretty absurd when you think about it since this could just as easily read, "10% of All Software Developers in the World, Concentrated in 10 Mile Radius."
It's more about cheap labor.
Similar with Austin. A house that was worth $150k in 2000 will be selling over $450-500k, just for the land alone. To boot, there is a big difference between living in the city proper than one of the outlying cities. I go to Round Rock and wait for a friend to show up, in less than 10 minutes, neighbors will be showing up and asking what I am doing there, and if they don't like the answer, the police will be there soon after. Austin, I have to chase people off who are trying to bump locks or try car door handles almost weekly. I am a native Austinite and hate living in town, but the pay is decent, and IT jobs abound, especially if you can do basic automation with Puppet, Ansible, or other cmtools, and can keep up with the times.
TIL India is outside of Silicon Valley
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
wooosh?
Why is there a medium-size blob of programmers exactly on the corner of Colorado/Utah/Wyoming? There is nothing located there, not even an NSA data center.
arrowheads.
Better pay attention to shit that matters, not where software developers live.
whats more shocking ? stupid article
I never understood what the big deal is with Silicon Valley. That region is filled with companies that have inept management. Why put HQ where 2342423424 other companies jockey for the scarce talent in the area? The US is a big place, they can put their offices in many other places...where realty prices are much lower, the weather is less hot, labor costs are lower, talent is plentiful, excellent colleges exist...the list goes on.
I thought it was pretty impressive that 10% of the world's software developers work in Silicon Valley, but turned out it was just 10% of software developers in the USA. Would it be too much to ask to include such little details in the title?
Oh, duh, you all live in Silicon Valley, and *everything* comes from there... Jezuz H. Christ on a crutch! Every big and most medium sized companies have teams ranging from small to huge, ON SITE. Mid-nineties, when I worked for Ameritech (former Baby Bell swallowed by SBC), we had hundreds of us, just on one big startup subdivision. And when I had a short contract with Lowe's (not Home Despot) in Nowhere, NC, they'd taken over, literally, and entire *mall*, and there might have been a thousand cubes, and dozens at least, more, in the main office. And then there's government.
Talk about a complete media illusion, mostly by "journalists" who don't know a phone from a server....
mark