The Best Cities For Tech Jobs
With Facebook poised to go public, the attention of the tech world, and Wall Street, is firmly focused on Silicon Valley. Without question, the west side of San Francisco Bay is by far the most prodigious creator of hot companies and has the highest proportion …
Context & Ripple Effects
Forbes' ranking lands on the eve of Facebook's NASDAQ debut, priced at $38 per share for over 421 million shares, so the region it crowns No. 1 is absorbing peak Wall Street attention at exactly the moment its flagship company converts into public-market wealth. That timing matters because the same question was being asked five years earlier, when Computerworld's 2007 survey of America's techiest cities already had Silicon Valley first and went looking for a credible No. 2.
The counterargument is also old news in this arc: back in April 2008, 37signals made the case against locating in San Francisco at all, arguing the costs of the cluster outweighed its network effects. What has changed since is the macro backdrop — a February 2012 WSJ report found Silicon Valley recovering faster than the nation as a whole — so Forbes is ratifying a rebound rather than discovering a trend.
First-order effects
- Facebook's IPO floods the South Bay with newly liquid founders, employees, and angel investors right as Forbes confirms it as the top creator of hot companies, sharpening an already lopsided contest for senior engineering talent.
- Job-seekers reading syndicated versions of the ranking in outlets like GeekWire and The Next Web get a data-backed nudge toward relocating to the Bay Area, while recruiters at companies in unranked metros must answer why their city isn't on the list.
Second-order effects
- Boosters of second-tier metros are pushed back into the framing Computerworld used in 2007 — conceding No. 1 and fighting over No. 2 — which keeps regional marketing budgets and talent-incentive packages competitive even as the winner consolidates.
- Concentrating more IPO wealth in one region re-escalates the cost-and-density critique 37signals raised in 2008, giving remote-friendly startups a fresh recruiting pitch against Valley salaries and rents.
Third-order effects
- If each liquidity event recycles into the same few ZIP codes, tech employment keeps consolidating around a handful of Bay Area hubs despite a decade of periodic 'leave San Francisco' arguments — with housing supply, not job creation, becoming the binding constraint on how big the cluster gets.
- Rankings like this harden into self-fulfilling infrastructure: capital follows the label, the label follows the capital, and second-city ecosystems compete mainly on cost rather than network density.
The trend: Tech jobs and the capital that funds them continue concentrating in Silicon Valley through successive cycles, with every IPO windfall reinforcing the cluster faster than distributed-work and cost arguments can erode it.