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Comment by mklim | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Landmass is not a useful metric since 75% of the population lives on 3 percent of the land (according to a quick google search).

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).

So to complete the thought, the Bay Area has about 5x the average density of programmers.

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.

Hey, a new definition of a "10x programmer”.

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.

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151131.htm#st

Hehe, silicon valley people usually forget about the east/north bay and pretty much anything north of the bay bridge or hayward bridge.

I live in San Francisco and trust me, the feeling is mutual.

But then you're overestimating, as many many programmers of Silicone Valley don't live in the valley itself.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

Not all of which stems from programming.

Crazy to think that Google accounts for ~10% of that [1].

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...

Google also has physical plant properties (think data centers) and offices around the world that are producing a meaningful portion of their revenue.

Btw, Apple had 3x Google's revenue in 2015.

In any case, Revenue != GDP due to double counting.

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.

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.

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm

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.

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