This Surprising City is Beating Silicon Valley Out for Tech Talent

If the first thing you think of when you hear ‘New York City’ is an incredible fashion scene and amazing food, you wouldn’t be wrong. But the city that never sleeps has also recently earned bragging rights in another area.  Forrester Research has reported that the New York region is now home to the largest number of tech talent in the United States. The Bay Area—Oakland, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco—has long held the title, but has been usurped. More tech hubs are popping up across the country. The regional landscape is continuing to evolve, and more people are pursuing career paths in technology fields. 

New York is now home to 333,000 tech workers, beating out the number of the Bay Area’s tech workers by 23,000. 

This surge of tech professionals is due in part to more people studying tech in college in the New York region. 7,631 computer science degrees from were awarded last year. That means more people have graduated from New York with tech degrees than any other city. 

The Bay Area still leads in number of app developers, but New York is working to play catch up. 

Software development companies such as Lotus Technologies and Swarm are headquartered in New York, and a rising number of freelance tech workers has contributed to a rising number of flexible coworking spaces in New York City to help accommodate them. Also, the New York region proves to be more well-rounded in terms of the types of tech work available than its counterpart out west. There are more database administrators, network specialists, and tech managers in the region, and New York region is also home to double the amount of IT security specialists.