This is a garbage article. At least link to the original press release from CBRE: https://www.cbre.us/about/media-center/tech-thirty-2016.
https://www.cbre.com/research-and-reports/Tech-30-2017
https://www.cbre.us/about/media-center/tech-talent-2018
https://www.cbre.us/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-Talent...
I still appreciate the link, though, because HuffPo didn't source their numbers, which look very strange. CBRE's 2017 data says San Francisco has had the highest percentage growth in tech jobs for 6 years running, and it's ~20 points higher than Toronto in each timeframe listed. The 2018 report does list Toronto growing at 51.5%, and the San Francisco Bay Area growing at 31%.
But we need to know what region is being assessed - the 2016 report separates San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so this is a crucial difference. San Francisco proper is 800,000 people, Silicon Valley is ~3,000,000, Toronto ~3,000,000 and the Bay Area is 8,000,000. The CBRE data does break out Silicon Valley separately, at least in pre-2018 reports. The headline here says "Silicon Valley", but the body gives numbers for the "San Francisco Bay Area".
Working backwards from the publicly-available CBRE report stats, I get 90,000 new tech jobs in Toronto from 2013-2017. That's noticeably higher than HuffPo's 82,000 from 2012-2017, but plausible given that I'm using CBRE's heavily-rounded numbers.
San Francisco apparently had 79,100 tech jobs at the start of 2017, up from 56,800 at the start of 2015. We can back-calculate to 38,600 tech workers in 2013. Calculations from Census Bureau estimates from that time period put the number somewhere very similar in 2013, suggesting that this is correct. CBRE tells us San Francisco also had the highest percentage growth surveyed in 2012, so we can project 2012 growth from the next years. Percentage growth has been slowing, so I used the 2013-2015 rate to get 7,300 new jobs in 2012. Those numbers are for San Francisco itself, population 800,000. If we nevertheless apply the 2017 "San Francisco Bay Area" percentage growth to this number, we get 2013-3017 growth of 65,600, for a 2012-2017 total change of 72,900.
> Toronto... beat out the San Francisco Bay Area for the spot by about 4,270 jobs.
82,000-72,900 = 9,100
This is 2x HuffPo's number, but I'm really working the data to make these rounded percentages workout. Fortunately, all of the other differences we're worried about dwarf this. It's not Silicon Valley, that's distinct, and it can't be the whole Bay Area, because that would imply the non-SF Bay Area of 7,200,000 people gained a total of 4,000 tech jobs in five years.
It looks like HuffPo used CBRE's San Francisco proper numbers, cited raw counts despite a ~4x population difference, and then reported it as the "San Francisco Bay Area" based on CBRE's 2018 language. That, or they failed to notice that CBRE (and other firms like PwC) have changed their region breakdown this year, and simply conflated Bay Area numbers from one year with San Francisco numbers from other years.
It looks like somebody tried for a dramatic-but-misleading story with a useless comparison, confused their subject between headline and body, and ultimately made a numerical statement that's simply false. Failing to link their source was probably a good move given all that.
(And I'll bet this article took half as long to write and publish as it took commenters to debunk. The Gish Gallop even works for professional news organizations.)