Quote:
Originally Posted by BrinChi
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/b...bs-cities.html
Boston, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco and Silicon Valley captured nine out of 10 jobs created in these industries from 2005 to 2017, according to a report released on Monday. By 2017, these five metropolitan regions had accumulated almost a quarter of these jobs, up from under 18 percent a dozen years earlier. On the other end, about half of America’s 382 metro areas — including big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia — lost such jobs.
I just find it really difficult to believe that Chicagoland had a net loss of 13,000 "innovation jobs" in this time period. I suppose it's possible that we've seen them conglomerate into downtown, which seems like growth to the city but is neutral for the region. Curious if anyone else has thoughts.
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I wouldn't
necessarily be surprised if you're comparing from 2005 and as Vlajos points out, it depends on your definition of "innovation jobs." I think what's more pertinent is what has happened since 2013.
There have been waves of the types of little bubbles with computing. Don't forget that the iPhone wasn't released until 2007 and there was not an app store at all until July 2008. The Android app store wasn't released until October 2008 and it took more "average" companies awhile to start developing for these platforms. Facebook Platform was released in its infancy in 2007. The recession hit around that time as well, so really many places might have lost what they had before and haven't necessarily recovered in pure head count. In reality, the app boom didn't really start until 2009, 2010, etc. I think a lot of non computer type of people didn't start learning how to make apps really until more like 2011 to be honest (to my knowledge).
Point being: what's going on now and why there's so much funding/hiring going on has nothing to do with what was going on pre 2009 or 2010 basically. Other areas like the Bay Area are the epicenter of this post 2009 or 2010 boom with apps and other online technologies. Chicago got started later than some other cities with startups and funding, really around 2013. They existed before and there were success stories, but not compared to the last handful of years IMO. A lot of what's happened also in the last 5 or 6 years has to do with companies modernizing not only their apps, but their websites to "re-do" their applications. And of course, the continuing trend of mobile apps from the 5 prior years which continues into today. As an example, around 5-7 years ago, a bunch of banks started working on modernizing and re-doing their online banking systems. There has been a lot of new developers that are focused on technologies like Javascript for reasons like this. There is a reason why these "coding bootcamps" exist.
So if we want to be more useful to what's going on
now, we'd be comparing to around probably 2010 or 2011, not 2005. What was going on in 2005 in the tech space is different than today and the last 5 years. The fact that NYC is not listed at all, which has by far the most funding of any area outside of the Bay Area, should tell you a lot about this study.
Just put this into perspective: Amazon's revenue in 2006 was "only" $10.7B. Today it's over $230B. That's a ton of hiring and there was a lot of it in Seattle. I think today they have something like 45,000 to 50,000 employees in Seattle alone. In 2006, they had around 14,000 employees in the entire world. Even if 10,000 of those were in Seattle, they've still added 35K to 40K jobs since then. They were ahead of the curve in a way - there's a lot of companies today that employ many people that aren't even that old.
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