Despite the hype, the nature of most tech jobs is not equally distributed throughout the country. Around 46 percent of all digital service jobs can be found in only 10 of its largest metropolitan areas, spanning from SF Bay Area and the Boston-New York-Washington Corridor, according to City Lab. Even so, these areas hold more than half of all venture capital investment, which is a clustered in the two tech regions.
New tech slow-down
The figures released by state labor officials and research consulting firm Beacon Economics showed that the numbers are now back at 3.5 percent or 26,700 new jobs in 2016.
The speed of growth is significantly slower compared to the 6 percent annual job gain of 42,300 tech jobs in 2015 and the 6.4 percent growth in 2014. Tech companies at the Bay Area has announced plans to slash up more jobs, up to 2,000 tech jobs, by the first quarter this year. Yet compared to total Job Growth, the tech sector remains a leading job engine in the Bay Area, which consists of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties.
Layoffs in a homogeneous market
With the tech industry, growth and layoffs happen simultaneously. Director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, Stephen Levy, said that this is due to how the companies work because of “several companies trying to make the same products or services”.
What has continued to happen is companies hiring and getting rid of people at the same time, due to a variety of reasons, for example a failed business model. Experts are saying that this cycle will continue as tech companies validate their business ideas in iterations. As a result, Bay Area’s tech companies last year still created more jobs than they shed, but it’s all happening at a slower pace.
779,300 people were employed by tech companies at the end of 2016 in Bay Area, with Santa Clara creating more new tech jobs than the other counties, accounting for 47 percent of the total Bay Area tech jobs. Tech companies are required to list layoff announcements with state officials. For the first quarter of this year, notifications have been filed by a handful of companies, including Visa, NetApp, Marvell Semiconductor, Google, and AOL.
