While speculation is mounting that they’re overheating, the tech boom is still creating jobs at a rapid pace in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, placing them atop our annual assessment of The Best Cities For Jobs for the third year in a row. A number of secondary tech centers are posting strong growth as well on the back of the boom, as well as spillover from Northern California as high prices push expanding companies and startups to locate elsewhere.
Tech job growth has been strong, but it’s not been equally distributed across the country. For example, U.S. employment in software publishing is up 5.5% from last year to a weighted total of 343,000 jobs, 26% above the sector’s prior peak amid the dot-com bubble in 2001. The twin capitals of the U.S. tech industry have accounted for much of the growth. Employment in the information sector in the San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco metropolitan statistical area expanded 6.8% last year, capping a torrid growth rate of 62% since 2010. At the same time the metro area’s professional business service sector — which employs almost four times as many as information (270,000) at such firms as Salesforce.com, Uber and Oracle — has grown an impressive 45% since 2010. Overall, the San Francisco metro area clocked 4.6% employment growth last year, and an impressive 23.8% since 2010, placing it first on our list of The Best Cities For Jobs for the second year in a row.
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