An overview of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which shows California's percentage of US tech jobs has continued to steadily decline since 2020
and its share of total US tech jobs has hit the lowest level in a decade https://www.apricitas.io/... @josephpolitano : Since August 2022, California has lost 21k jobs in computer systems design, 15k in streaming & social networks, 11k in software publishing, and 7k in web search The state has added only 6k tech jobs since the start of COVID, while the rest of the US has added roughly 570k. [image] @soquelcreek : @JosephPolitano Well, thanks to the pandemic, companies have figured out that many tech. employees can work from anywhere. Meanwhile, CA has the USA's highest state income tax rates and capital gains are taxed just like income in California. California's Legislature is detrimental. [image] Timothy B. Lee / @binarybits : California is losing ground as a tech employment hub. https://www.apricitas.io/... [image] Arpit Gupta / @arpitrage : CA is bleeding tech jobs to the rest of the country as a consequence of failing to build housing and remote work; which will have long term budgetary implications for the state From @JosephPolitano [image] @josephpolitano : Where are California tech jobs going? That's hard to say with a high degree of precision, but we can get a general idea by looking at the information sector excluding media & telecoms There Texas, Washington, and Florida have all seen faster job gains than California since COVID [image] John Michael McGrath / @jm_mcgrath : “Florida's info tech payrolls grew 27%, Texas' grew 24%, Washington's grew 18%, New York's grew 8%, and California's grew a meager 5%.” https://www.apricitas.io/... Giacomo Volpe / @_giacomo_volpe_ : The state continues its evolution into a big beautiful retirement home for rich people @josephpolitano : The share of total US tech jobs located in California rose steadily throughout the 2010s, but has fallen significantly since the start of the pandemic That drop accelerated over the last year, falling nearly a full percentage point as California begins to lose tech jobs outright [image] @makeabuck2 : nice 🧵 glad some one's paying attention contrary, to popular and superficial discourse, many companies have had remote/location strategies in place for hiring since the pandemic no one put that genie back in the box. @josephpolitano : California still dominates the high end of the tech sector, though—despite making up only 18% of information-sector employment, down from 20% pre-COVID, the Golden State still makes up 31% of all information-sector pay. [image] @josephpolitano : The loss of tech jobs has also prevented a full recovery of the labor markets in California's major tech hubs—the San Francisco metro area remains 54k below pre-COVID job levels, the biggest drop of any major metro, while Los Angeles comes in second with 38k job losses [image] LinkedIn: Jeroen de Jong : # California is losing tech Jobs — Interesting data points from Joseph Politano. — The focus is on the evolution and distribution of tech jobs in the USA. … Forums: Hacker News : Ask HN: Does it still matter to be in the Bay Area? r/Economics : California is Losing Tech Jobs
Context & Ripple Effects
California’s shrinking share follows earlier signs that hiring was dispersing: in 2021, a growing portion of West Coast tech companies’ listings was located outside the region in an expansion of out-of-region job postings. The shift now appears in employment totals rather than listings alone.
The result also sharpens a mismatch in the broader labor market: US tech employment was still expanding amid layoffs in 2022, with workers moving into other industries as tech occupations continued to grow nationally. California’s weak net gain therefore matters chiefly as a relative loss of national tech-employment weight.
First-order effects
- California’s share of US tech jobs falls to its lowest point in a decade, after substantial losses since August 2022 in computer systems design, streaming and social networks, software publishing, and web search.
- San Francisco and Los Angeles remain materially below their pre-COVID employment levels, while California added far fewer tech jobs than the rest of the country over the same period.
Second-order effects
- States including Florida, Texas, Washington, and New York become relatively more important sources of information-sector job growth, giving employers more established alternatives to California-centered hiring.
- The employment data reinforce the earlier weak office-return and layoff pressures in San Francisco, extending the challenge from downtown occupancy to the region’s share of tech labor growth.
Third-order effects
- If the divergence persists, US tech employment may become less geographically concentrated even if California remains a high-paying technology center; its 31% share of information-sector pay versus 18% of employment points to that distinction.
- State housing, tax, and labor-policy debates will increasingly be judged against whether they affect where incremental jobs are created, though this dataset alone cannot isolate the cause of the shift.
The trend: Tech’s post-pandemic labor footprint is broadening beyond its historic California core as distributed work and regionally diversified hiring reduce the state’s share of new employment.