Tech Jobs Leaving California
apolloacademy.com
apolloacademy.com
The statistics indicate that Texas's share rose 1 percentage point from 7% to 8% across the entire chart, while California's rose about 4 percentage points from 16% to 20% before falling 2 percentage points to 18%. The lines do not want you to believe that.
(FWIW, I'm not even entirely certain I know what these percentages are of--the numerator seems to be tech jobs within a state, but is the denominator all tech jobs in the country, or is it all jobs within the state?)
Of course, much of that problem would b solved if founders + CEOs were more flexible about WFH.
WFH feels like such an obvious competitive advantage it's surprising to me that so many founders want in office teams.
"Look at all these people I boss around! I have low self esteem and I really need this validation of my own personal self worth."
Some Elizabeth Homes energy right there.
This is graph is basically How to Lie with Statistics 101. The author seems to be trying to show a correlation where one might not exist.
(Edit: There is also a footnote saying that they're lumping in movie-making, music recording, and television/radio broadcasting into their definition of "tech." Further reason to not really take this seriously.)
Not nothing. But I do agree that the graph is scaled to make the issue look more pronounced.
And it remains to be seen if the trend continues
Edit: someone pointed out something I missed. The y-axis is different on both sides. If the axes were the same, Texas would hardly be a blip
I remember following the 2008 crash when layoffs happened in US companies (usually the highly paid senior ones) and then those same positions got relocated to my city in Eastern Europe (and other countries) for a fraction of the wages. The exec who lead that probably got a good bonus for this move.
I feel the same pattern might be repeating again, especially with remote work being more normalized now in some companies, and the talent pool abroad being bigger and more upskilled now than it was in 2009 along with increased English fluency.
2000-2008 I think was more of outsourcing. Companies dipped their toes in the water and tried to get low cost labor through third party companies. I think generally this does not work.
Now we have companies that off shore with full company offices in those regions like India. This can work.
On top of that you near shoring companies in Mexico and further south that can provide you lower wage engineers but that work in your timezone.
Time zone is not a big road block. Some devs in EE will accept to work in the evening to overlap with the US time, because they get paid 2x-3x the local take-home market rate, so it makes it worth their while.
Obviously it's easier timing wise for those on the Latin American continent, but mucho dinero is a good motivator for everyone, especially if they also happen to be night owls.
Also, this is starting to happen for other non software and related engineering fields as well. Eventually I wonder if the U.S. government will have to step in.things that do not require us licensing are being near shored.
https://comptiacdn.azureedge.net/webcontent/docs/default-sou...
Check the California and Texas summaries pages 20 and 59, and the summary tables starting page 120
The way I look at it, using real scale won't make the data visible. Texas will look like a line at the bottom while the trend for California won't be accentuated.
But then, the author used the title "Tech Jobs Leaving California" while not providing the exact numbers; as it's possible that tech jobs increased while their share decreased. So maybe he does have a political bias...