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Have you ever wondered where tech talent actually lives? Sure, we all know there are a ton of techies in the Bay Area and the fact that Microsoft is based in Seattle means there’s probably a good number of them there too. But what about the rest of the country?
Well, a study by CBRE looked at the top 50 markets in the U.S. and tried to score them according to their tech talent. The study looked at 13 metrics relating to tech talent, and then weighted them by their relative importance. Among the metrics, those relating to the concentration of tech talent and the overall amount of it in a market were heavily weighted because those indicate clustering – which is apparently important.
Unsurprisingly, cities around the Bay Area scored very well – like they always do in these studies. However, once you look outside of the Bay Area, there were other tech markets that scored almost as well. As a reference, Silicon Valley received an overall score of 76.91. Washington D.C. followed closely behind, with a solid 71.39 and New York City a 64.41. Austin received a 58.53, ahead of Atlanta and shockingly, behind Baltimore – though both of those cities have far larger metro-populations than Austin.
In fact, Austin has the smallest metro-population of any of the top 15 cities – a fact that becomes apparent when looking at the overall size of the cities’ tech talent labor pool. While Austin didn’t make the top 15, the Dallas/Ft. Worth area took the number three spot behind Washington D.C. and New York.
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What Austin may be lacking in brute size, it is making up with some pretty intense growth. According to the report Austin’s tech talent grew at just over 26 percent between 2010 and 2013.
Ok, so Austin may not be the biggest tech city in the world -- but it hits well above its size, and that's the way we like it.
If you’re interested, the CBRE offers a tool that allows you to compare tech data in up to five markets at one time. You can find that here.
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