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Comment by condiment | Hacker News Reader

I would be interested in seeing a follow-up analysis where the figures are adjusted to account for the resident populations in each of the listed cities (and metro areas).

Looking at US cities only, the Bay Area is utterly exceptional in terms of tech/startup career opportunities. Amsterdam (at 4.15 jobs per 100k) is better than NY or LA, but is an order of magnitude worse than San Francisco.

  City		Pop	Jobs	Jobs/100k
  New York	8175133	165	2.018315788
  Los Angeles	3792621	58	1.52928542
  Chicago	2695598	21	0.779047914
  San Francisco	805235	344	42.72044807
  Boston	617594	64	10.36279498
  Washington	601723	23	3.822356799
  Seattle	608660	42	6.900404167
  Austin	790390	30	3.79559458
  Palo Alto	64403	89	138.1923202

  Amsterdam	820256	34	4.1450474

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I think that all those figures prove is that HN has a Bay Area bias, not that "the Bay Area is utterly exceptional in terms of tech/startup career opportunities".

I mean, it is great, but a developer would have no problems finding a good job in New York or Boston, at least.

The numbers do match up pretty closely with careers.stackoverflow.com, atleast.

Another possible interpretation of the jobs/population number is "which cities have lots of job openings despite not being dominated by the tech industry," if someone wanted to be somewhere more diverse. Though, unsurprisingly, the answer is basically "the big ones" so it's not all that interesting there.

I agree that this may be the case.

My aim in posting these figures was just to give an example how correlating the number of job postings with each area's population can give additional meaning to the data. So instead of being fooled by a population graph masquerading as a job graph, we can see where jobs outpace the population, and by how much.

For a more detailed analysis, marshaling job postings from additional startup-focused job boards and correcting the city population figures to reflect the metro areas would provide a minimum level of rigor to the data. Comparisons between startup job postings and 'corporate' postings could provide a bit of extra perspective as well.

I think a more correct measure would take the population of the entire bay area into account, since many people who work in startups don't live in San Francisco or Palo Alto directly.

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