And the Bay Area is roughly 6,900 square miles vs the 3,806,000 square miles of the US as a whole. Put another way, Silicon Valley is where you can find 10% of the total number of US developers despite it being only ~0.002% of the country's landmass. I get the general point the author is trying to make, but 10% in such a small region is still an extraordinarily high number.
A quick Wikipedia search says the whole Bay Area accounts for about 2% of the population of the US, and Silicon Valley itself a little over 1% (7.65MM & 3.5-4MM total, out of 324MM).
For another metric, I'm getting that the Bay Area GDP is $800 billion [1] vs the overall US's $18 trillion [2], which would mean the Bay has 4.4% of the economic activity.
Very true. Both are global companies, even though their headquarters are there. I wonder what fraction of their income can be attributed to the SV area, and how that translates to their contributions to the GDP.
Bay Area is probably not a good metric because that would include Napa, Sonoma, etc. where you are more likely to find a farmer or a sommelier than a programmer.
Silicon Valley as a measure - 1% of the country's population but 10% of its programmers. So, 10x the national average of programmers.
More are urban than non-urban, so the national average isn't a particularly useful number either.
Here's a relevant page by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you scroll down a bit past the state-level charts, they start showing metropolitan areas. "San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara" has a fairly good compromise between volume and density, but it's not at the top of either chart.
If you want to go deeper into this, BLS data has a fantastic metric for measuring the relative density of different occupations by metro area - the location quotient.
As you can see, in the Bay Area, the two most common software-related occupations are ~2.9 times as common as the US as a whole (Software Developers - Systems Software, and Software Developers - Applications).
But they both lose out to Solar Photovoltaic Installers and Genetic Counsellors, which are 6(!) times as more common on the Bay Area than the rest of the US (from a much smaller base, though).
Edit: If you slice by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, looking only at Systems developers, the quotient goes to around 9 - far ahead of runners up in Massachusetts and Huntsville, AL.
This was actually a much more surprising statistic to me. I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley for almost 10 years now, and I assumed that number was more like <= 1%. It's astonishing to me that 10% of the programmers in the US are here. Talk about burying the lede...
The 10% programmers number is for Silicon valley, not Bay Area. So, to compare apples to apples, we should take the % of US population for Silicon Valley, not Bay Area.
Which is about 1% of US population (3M people according to google).
This is actually a very surprising statistic to me. I lived in LA and was not happy with the job offerings at all and moved back to the bay area where I'm originally from.
I'm also surprised that San Jose has 2x the concentration of software developers than San Francisco. Maybe its just because I have a startup bias and that seems to be the trend for startups. Very few startups in SJ compared to SF.
Most of the established companies are in the San Jose area: Google, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, eBay, Netflix, major defense contractors, satellite campuses for Amazon and Microsoft, and lots of other companies. Altogether, they employ more engineers than all of the startups combined.
It's really unclear what they are defining as SF vs. San Jose. If we're going by positions and metro areas, I'd believe this.
San Jose metro gets super-large companies (Google, Apple, etc.), which SF lacks. Oakland also is in the SF metro area, and lacks substantial number of software jobs.
I live in LA and the job offerings are ok but the housing market here is out of control. Problem is, the salaries are still a little bit lower. Or a lot lower.
Then again you've got the beach and some might say the dating scene is better. So there's that.
Haha, thanks for the chuckle. The ability for the US to focus entirely within their own borders is both depressing and amusing to observe at times. I get that people will naturally gravitate to caring about their own nation, but Americans' ability to don blinders that completely disregard the other 95.7% of the world's population is astounding.
Aside from the article's title? "90% of software developers work outside Silicon Valley". Uh, no. 99.99xx% of software developers work outside Silicon Valley. HN had to adjust its title to include the context of "US". It's part of SV culture to present themselves as being at the centre of the universe when it comes to software, when the rest of us know it's the furthest thing from the truth. SV gets all the attention as the self-proclaimed hub of all things development, but if you apply a proper global context, SV is hardly a blip on the radar.
The pride and pure ego involved in having one of the "top 5" on one's resume is funny to many of us outside the self-flagellating ecosystem.
What does SV represent? As a developer, there is very little difference between SV and anywhere else. The business money is there. Business money does not translate to fame and riches to average employees.
I would be curious to see the percentage change over the years. With the growth of tech everywhere (note on the map there's lots of big circles) and cost of living sky rocketing in the Bay Area, Boston, etc...What's the influx like of people moving to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, etc...
Seriously, I have a very nice house on nearly a quarter of an acre for about 200k and a nice 6 figure programming job in Portland, OR. I can't imagine ever moving to Silicon Valley and dealing with the taxes, high housing prices, traffic, etc.
The talent shortage they refer to is merely a shortage of engineers willing to work at the salaries and under the conditions offered.
In a normal market wages would merely rise to adjust for that. But curiously it seems to be the only area where there is sudden vehement opposition to market forces.
I doubt employers will boost salaries by much... How can we get companies to locate in "suburbs" of Silicon Valley, where rents are cheaper: Livermore, Morgan Hill/Gilroy, Scott's Valley, Pacifica, even Fairfield and Santa Rosa?
If you combine this with studies about the tipping point of ideas starting at about 10% of the population [1], it means SV already has enough of the programmer population to create self-sustaining trends in software.
I don't know whether to feel glad or be worried :-)
This article is terrible. It uses 90% as evidence developers are moving out without any other statistics, namely the percentage from another period of time. Its completely baseless. No shit most of the developers don't live in one city or region.
You're being downvoted for the unhelpful 'redneck startups?' comment, but I am actually curious what the cause of that large circle is! There is no city right there. (Although amusingly, not too far away are places named Mountain View and Manila, both of whose namesakes house a lot of developers.)
Denver was a hive of software startup activity back in 90s. I flew in there to look at a company in 1992 o behalf of my employer (Geac at that time, based in Markham, Ontario, I was based at a subsdiary FACT in New Zealand). My lasting impression however was Freddy Fudpuckers. Hilarious name and hilarious food. Anyway I digress .... for those just out of kindergarten you would be excused for thinking startups are a new idea. For those of us with decades of creating new bugs, we have seen the locations for startups move around depending on tax policy, cost of living, and being close to a major innovator (Austin Tx = IBM and NASA as an example).
I think you're right. The source for the story, on arcgis.com, seems to have updated maps that don't show the odd circle, and Colorado displays with a bigger circle right on Denver. I think for some reason Denver was rendered at (0,0) within Colorado's boundaries in the screen shot Qwartz used.
I remember flying into Denver's airport a year or two after it opened and thinking "Wow, this place is in the middle of nowhere." I visited again a year ago and was surprised to find it quite built up, and located close to the places I wanted to go.
Controversial statement: the number of actual, honest-to-god "10x developers" that exist in specific, narrow domains or contexts is so small that using them as a standard of comparison in any context (including their domains) is complete nonsense, and the number relative to the entire population of developers is so small that one can do just spectacularly well acting as if such a creature doesn't even exist.
If you're lucky, you get to work closely with one. My boss is one such, he spends 50% of his time on managerial duties and still manages to outcode me, and I'm no slouch myself.
Ask one of those people on here that brags about rejecting 95% of their applicants while using questions ripped straight out of "Cracking the Coding Interview" or something lol.
