The Cities With The Most Technology Jobs That Pay The Most

Check out the videos on the website of three-year-old coding school Galvanize and you will meet Dan Morris, a former professional poker player who trained to be a data scientist through a $16,000 12-week course. Morris tapped into what is arguably the hottest job in tech, paying an average of $117,000 this year, according to a new report by the job aggregator Indeed.com.

Eleven-year-old Indeed, based in Austin, put together Beyond the Talent Shortage: How Tech Candidates Search for Jobs. It includes information relevant to both employers and job seekers. The top cities for tech jobs are the usual suspects: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Austin, San Diego. These cities are only surprising insofar as all of them do not match the cities that have come up in recent stories we’ve done on where the tech jobs are.

The last piece I wrote, in April, took data from a personal finance website we respect, called NerdWallet. It used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to calculate tech employees per 1,000 total jobs in a metro area. But that was only half the score. It also looked at mean wages for those jobs, again from BLS data and then median gross rent from the Census Bureau.

Indeed’s list focuses 100% on job listings on its own site and the salary numbers come from estimates derived from its listings. It broke down software jobs into 18 of the most popular titles and then it calculated tech jobs as a share of all job listings in the 25 cities that have the greatest share of tech jobs. Hence several of the smaller cities on the Nerdwallet list, like Huntsville, AL and Durham, NC, did not rank on Indeed’s list.

Another quirk of the Indeed list: It looked at cities as opposed to metro areas, which leaves out many jobs in the San Francisco and San Jose area, since jobs at the giant headquarters of companies like Google, based in Mountain View, Facebook in Menlo Park and Apple in Cupertino, won’t likely come up in Indeed’s listings, though Google and Facebook have small San Francisco offices and Apple is reportedly getting set to open one there. Of course San Francisco has plenty of tech startups and more established players like Twitter, Pinterest and Airbnb. For its part, San Jose has big tech players like eBay, Cisco and Adobe. More important is the fact that virtually every business needs tech workers nowadays to handle some of their functions. Media companies like Forbes have their share of web developers, one of the high-paying software jobs on Indeed’s list with an average salary of $87,000.

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