East Coast cities overtaking Silicon Valley for tech job hotspots

The center of gravity in the IT job market is shifting east. Washington, DC, and New York City now have more available tech jobs than Silicon Valley.

According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco metro area showed 2,369 software-engineering job postings and the Silicon Valley area had 2,084 at the end of 2022. By contrast, DC had 3,815 and the New York metro area had 3,325.

“The balance has been shifting to the East Coast for some time,” David Lewis, CEO of Norwalk, Connecticut-based OperationsInc, told IT Brew in a recent interview, adding, “If you’re paying attention to the signs on the outside of the buildings, and the brands that are there, you’ve known that there’s been a big move towards tech.”

Those East Coast gigs aren’t all with large IT firms, but span a number of industries—reflecting how tech has become an integral part of nearly every business’s operations. It’s not just DC and New York City, either—Fred Voccola, CEO of software company Kaseya, is based in Miami, and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Kaseya moved from Silicon Valley to Miami in 2015 after Voccola took over as CEO.

“You couldn’t pay me to go back to the Valley,” he told IT Brew.

Opportunity knocks. Big firm layoffs are presenting companies based on the East Coast with new opportunities. Ximena Gates, co-founder and president of DC-based BuildWithin, told IT Brew that the glut of East Coast jobs is attracting a pool of prospective employees who don’t have a ton of options in California.

“We have all taken advantage of layoffs in Silicon Valley and other places to hire more people,” Gates said.

Gates is unsurprised that DC is becoming a player in the white-collar tech world. She described a number of aspects of the region—good schools, a highly educated and diverse workforce, a younger generation of professionals, to name a few—that are appealing to employers and employees alike.

“Government affairs is going to continue to fuel energy from the tech industry in the area because the lobbying industry has grown instead of shrinking, and we only have one Congress, and it’s right here,” Gates said.

Economic outlook. The layoffs are coming at a contradictory time for the US economy. While large tech firms are cutting positions by the thousands, the job market as a whole is tight. Unemployment is at historic lows in some states, and people are still quitting their jobs to look for better work elsewhere. The job market and economic fears are “as much an oil and water moment as you possibly can find,” Lewis said.

To Lewis, tech is better described as a skill set than a sector. IT no longer means being tied to code development at one of 200 or so large tech companies. Rather, “companies across the board in all major categories of our economy, are leveraging people to be able to sort of do the things that they need to in order to be successful.”

“Tech is not just about a sector in our economy,” Lewis said. “Tech is a skill set that is as common as marketing in companies across the US—and for that matter across the globe.”—EH