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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> The SF Bay Area remains by far the largest share of all tech employees in the U.S., with 49% of all Big Tech engineers and 27% of startup engineers, data from SignalFire’s Beacon platform shows.

Not mentioned: with 10% of total US software engineers.

When discussing startups maybe that's not relevant, but the article says "tech employees", not "big tech and startup employees". A lot of people forget that most companies who employee tech workers are neither big tech nor startups, which in turn means that most tech employees are at neither. This is likely increasingly true with the end of free money.

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Tech in this context means the tech sector of the economy. Yes there are software engineers working at a bank or government office, but they aren't tech [company] employees, hence not counted in this statistic.

I don’t even understand what the term "tech sector" really means. It seems to be exclusively companies that sell or provide a software (platform) as their main product, plus chip/electronics manufacturers, but excludes defense contractors, aerospace (minus spacex maybe), automotive (minus Tesla maybe), biotech/pharma, and finance (aside from "fintech" startups).

The word tech really got co-opted.

It's really a good distinction where SV is good and where is not (so other first world countries don't have tech by definition)

That's really for wall street analysts to decide. Maybe they flip a coin, I can't say.

So, if I'm understanding what you're saying: The article is referring to a sector of the economy that is essentially undefinable and using statistics they somehow derived about that undefinable sector to argue that San Francisco is the center of said undefinable sector.

Do I have that right?

(If so, this is not reassuring me that their cited statistics are in any way meaningful.)

You can use any definition you want and argue semantics all day long. The conclusion is still going to be that Silicon Valley is the center of the global tech industry and where most talent is concentrated and where most new innovation is happening.

If you create special definitions for "global tech industry" and "talent" and "innovation" specifically in order to arrive at that result, absolutely!

Meanwhile, those of us in the 90% of US developers and 99% of worldwide developers will keep on innovating and building new stuff regardless of the semantic games you want to play to keep your Bay-centric worldview.

It’s just ties back to silicon valley. Does the sector inherently require a processor/transistor?

  Cars no 
  Aircraft no
  Pills no
  Banks no

  Self-driving car yes
  Software yes
  Fintech yes
  Tablet yes

Sure modern cars use lots of processors, but the Model T didn’t. It may seem a little vague around where the line between industries is, but at the extreme things line up quite well.

I work at a company whose only product is software, but it's about twenty years old and has a few hundred employees. It's a tech company that isn't a startup and isn't "big tech".

Ok, so you are a tech employee. What's your issue?

Obviously, they the article misrepresents the proportions of tech employees, and thus them, and fails to mention that 80%+ of the tech economy is outside of SF.

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