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Comment by xox | Hacker News Reader

What I find remarkable about the chart is the volume of tech jobs in D.C. relative to the population:

D.C. has a population of about 600 thousand versus about 8 million in NYC and yet tech hiring seems to be roughly on a par in these two cities.

That's mind blowing (to me at least).

If that's correct, it must be virtually impossible to be an unemployed programmer in D.C.

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Ah, but there's a catch: many of the jobs require security clearances. You need to be a US citizen, and usually need to be cleared already. If you're cleared though... it's a license to print money (heck, you might just BE printing money).

Is it because of government related jobs?

"So you lived in the imperial seat in the US, the one are where 75% of people are working for the government (directly or indirectly), and the one place that actually GREW during the current recession."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1271560

There's over 5 million people in the D.C. area (D.C., Southern MD and Northern Virginia). Coupled with a highly educated workforce, plentiful higher education options, and a rapidly modernizing federal government, and you actually see very very few unemployed developers. Most places I know in the area get the vast vast majority of their resumes from incoming immigrants looking for an H1-B sponsor or a Green Card sponsor.

D.C. proper by comparison has very little going on.

Do you know if they eventually go for it? (H1-B sponsoring?). I'm a wannabe immigrant, and I wouldn't mind an H1-B sponsor :)

Some places are. It's difficult because the biggest employer in the area is the U.S. Federal Government. So it's hard to hire non-citizens. But there is a relatively healthy private sector as well. You just have to try and find those smaller employers. Most of the resume's I've seen also seem to be coming in through a recruiting agency if that helps.

DC's metropolitan area population is more than a quarter the size of NYC's, so it's as much of a surprise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metropolitan_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

It could also mean that it's still relatively hard to find a programming job in NYC, or that a greater proportion of DC companies use dice.com than NYC companies.

I was reading an unemployment report the local Fairfax county paper (in northern VA if you don't know). During this recession the unemployment rate was 5.6%. I think it normally hovers around 4.6% or something.

This isn't to say that the housing bubble did not affect the area. It did. But the unemployment rate is still very close to "normal."

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