Study shows hiring for tech positions surpassed all other occupations, even healthcare jobs, in New York City between April and November 2020
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2020, New York had already been framed as a bona fide East Coast rival to Silicon Valley, with tech giants keeping some 22K staff there (per the Times' hub analysis). The new WSJ-cited study sharpens that picture: during the pandemic's worst stretch, April through November 2020, tech was the single fastest-hiring occupation in the five boroughs — ahead of even healthcare, the sector one would expect a crisis to lift.
First-order effects
- Employers across NYC industries — not just software firms — were competing directly for tech workers during 2020, putting upward pressure on pay and benefits citywide.
- Healthcare employers lost their usual position as the city's dominant hirer, signaling that tech demand had become deep enough to anchor the local labor market.
Second-order effects
- Sustained local supply of engineers makes NYC attractive to finance-sector and corporate buyers of tech talent, a dynamic later credited when CBRE measured 394,300 NYC tech jobs against the Bay Area's 375,730 (the top-market ranking).
- National tech occupational growth — a record 6.39M jobs by November 2022, up 12% YoY (per the Times) — gave laid-off or mobile workers more destinations, intensifying metro-level competition for them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tech employment consolidates into a few dense urban talent pools rather than a single West Coast hub, with each pool developing a self-reinforcing talent moat of employers, universities, and worker networks.
- Cities competing on labor-supply metrics rather than tax incentives would mark a shift in how metros court tech industry expansion.
The trend: The 2020 NYC hiring surge is an early data point in tech employment redistributing from Silicon Valley toward multi-polar urban talent markets, a shift CBRE's later rankings confirmed.