During the pandemic, tech job postings remained concentrated in tech hubs, and those in tech hubs were less likely to mention remote work than elsewhere
Jed Kolko / Indeed Hiring Lab : Tweets: @jedkolko , @jedkolko , @jedkolko , and @hotlinejosh Tweets: Jed Kolko / @jedkolko : Tech hubs lagged other metros in retail, childcare, food prep, and other local services. In tech hubs, more people work in jobs that can be done from home, and spent less on local businesses. https://www.hiringlab.org/... 3/ https://twitter.com/... Jed Kolko / @jedkolko : What about remote? Tech job postings in hubs were LESS likely to mention remote work than tech postings elsewhere. Employers in tech hubs already have access to local tech workers. Employers elsewhere benefit even more from being open to remote work. https://www.hiringlab.org/... 5/ https://twitter.com/... Jed Kolko / @jedkolko : 🚨🚨🚨 new @indeed research 🚨🚨🚨 Tech hubs suffered in the pandemic in sectors _aside_ from tech. But tech job postings became slightly MORE concentrated in tech hubs, even with the shift to remote work. Thread! 1/ https://www.hiringlab.org/... Josh Kraushaar / @hotlinejosh : “Tech hubs had steeper declines and slower recoveries in job postings on Indeed during the pandemic than other places. But that's not because tech jobs dispersed. Rather, tech hubs lost other jobs because larger shares of their residents worked from home” https://www.hiringlab.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands a year into a whipsaw cycle for tech hiring: after the ~20% collapse in job openings in spring 2020, Indeed Hiring Lab's Jed Kolko finds the recovery was not geographically even — posting activity re-concentrated in established tech hubs even as remote work became mainstream.
The counterintuitive detail is who embraced remote: hub employers, sitting on deep local talent pools, mentioned it least, while postings elsewhere leaned on it to reach workers they could not hire locally. That asymmetry builds on earlier evidence like New York City tech hiring outpacing every other occupation through late 2020.
First-order effects
- Employers outside tech hubs get the direct benefit: open-to-remote tech postings let them compete for the same engineers as Bay Area and NYC firms without competing on location.
- Hub-based tech employers face no such pressure — their postings can stay onsite-leaning because local supply of home-office-capable tech workers is already dense.
Second-order effects
- Tech hubs' non-tech sectors take the hit: with a larger share of residents able to work from home, spending on retail, childcare, food prep, and other local services fell harder there than elsewhere.
- Smaller employers turn remoteness into a recruiting weapon — a pattern later visible in the 81% of sub-5K-employee companies offering remote work versus 26% at 25K+ firms.
Third-order effects
- The Brookings finding that 36 mid-size cities saw stronger post-pandemic tech job growth hints at slow diffusion at the edges, even as coastal-hub concentration itself held — suggesting remote work widens the candidate map without yet relocating the jobs.
- If hub incumbents keep under-offering remote while smaller firms and secondary cities embrace it, the long-run contest for tech talent shifts toward whoever prices flexibility, not geography.
The trend: Tech employment geography is splitting: postings remain anchored in coastal hubs while remote-friendly employers outside them quietly absorb the talent that location once locked in place.