Software developers and programmers are finding the best jobs thousands of miles away from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
There are more job openings for software developers in Washington, D.C., and New York than in those California markets. This is because non-tech companies are hiring more engineers while startups and tech giants are cutting back.
At the end of last year, there were 2,369 software engineering job postings in the San Francisco area and 2,084 around San Jose, California. At that time, there were 3,815 job postings in the Washington, D.C., area. There were also 3,325 in the New York City metro area, according to an analysis of job listings by Vertis AI Inc.
Vertis says that the number of job postings for software engineers in San Francisco and San Jose peaked in the first half of 2022 and has gone down a lot since then.
Last year, more than 150,000 jobs were cut by tech companies. Many of these layoffs happened in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which is where Facebook and Google are based. Recruiters in the tech industry are telling people to look for jobs in other fields, like banks, and telecommunications companies. They say those companies offer career growth and security, even if they don’t have stock options like in Silicon Valley.
“Those companies are in New York, D.C., and the secondary tech hubs,” said Patrick McAdams, CEO of the staffing and recruiting company Andiamo Consulting LLC. “Startups will be able to compete, but they won’t be able to offer candidates the same level of stability.”
Handshake, a site for people looking for their first job, has seen similar trends. According to the company’s data, there were more software and computer engineering jobs in non-tech industries like government, construction, and finance in 2022 than in the year before, even though there were fewer software and computer engineering jobs overall. Andiamo did a survey of tech workers who had lost their jobs and found that twice as many tech workers were moving to New York.
A study by Motion Recruitment Partners LLC found that software jobs pay the most in San Francisco and San Jose. Los Angeles and New York also pay well. Charlotte, North Carolina, and Philadelphia are two cities where people get paid less.
After many people left the Bay Area because of the pandemic, some companies are building hubs on the East Coast.
