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Comment by bit_logic | Hacker News Reader

Disappointed Los Angeles didn't make the list but not surprising. LA has all the right things like colleges (UCLA USC Caltech and others) and same CA employment laws as Silicon Valley. It has big companies like Snapchat but just can't seem to cross that threshold into major tech hub. Maybe Hollywood is just too dominant here, similar to how NYC isn't on the list because finance dominates there.

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When I lived in Los Angeles, a significant amount of tech jobs I applied / interviewed for where in the industry. It's possible they are over-looking all the major studios (Sony, NBC, etc), along with the very large support for gaming and movies. Data pipeline, meta data management, and streaming are just a few things that are popular out there.

I think the difference is that many companies in LA are smaller and independent, but I caution that anyone who thinks that Hollywood is more than a small fraction of Los Angeles work hasn't explored much of the city. E-commerce and random website dev is also a much larger market than any town I've seen.

Another problem is the shear size of the city and the accompanying suburbs. You have tech in Pasadena, Burbank, Santa Monica, Torrence, etc, and no sane person would make these cross-town drives every day. I don't think that many people who live in LA even realize how large the place is, and possibly wouldn't realize that many "cities" aren't cities at all, but a part of LA.

In my observation, there is more tech work in LA than Austin, but I digress.

Video games traditionally (Electronic Arts, Westwood Studios -> Blizzard). You have Symantec and now Google and Snapchat. The Adsense guys were in LA as well. Doubleclick was in Pasadena. Match.com, Tinder, Grindr, and a few others around. So there is a mixture of things. Santa Barbara has some tech as well. I think UCLA needs to foster more of a tech transfer mentality. Stanford profs go and develop tech companies. UCLA ones do not to the same extent (or if they do they leave UCLA). I could be wrong about that but that's how I see it. I think Stanford has a better deal on student housing as well vs UCLA, but I could be wrong. UCLA has 44k students vs Stanford at 16k. Travis Kalanick came out of UCLA and has a story about raising a term sheet back in the day for a previous company that was written like a movie term sheet (aka really bad). So that may have something to do with it as well. But I think it is changing. The Bay area is bursting at the seams so you will see the market evolve.

> NYC isn't on the list because finance dominates there

In 2014, New York City had 165,300 finance jobs (NAIC code 523) and 365,500 tech jobs (541), broadly defined [1].

To illustrate why this article's metric is silly, consider that in 2014 about 4.1 million people were employed in New York City [2][3]. Thus 4% of employees worked in finance and 9% in tech. Hoboken, New Jersey, meanwhile, had 34,054 people employed in 2014 [4] and, in 2015, about 7,300 employed in finance [5] (22% of total employment). I guess we should crown Hoboken, instead of New York City, as the nation's new financial capital.

[1] https://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/PDFs/Significant-Industries-N...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/data/xg-tabl...

[3] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/n...

[4] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_industri...

[5] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/hoboken-nj/#category_occupati...

Yeah, same story with Chicago. Big tech scene (esp finance), some big universities (Northwestern, UChicago, UofI, IIT, etc)...

But in the end, it's the country's third largest city, the metro area is huge, and tech is just one industry of many. The number of jobs may be large, but the percentage will never be as high as with small, specialized towns.

And I see that your handle is the zip code for River North. Well played.

Like NY, the population is just way too big for percentage ranked metrics.

Those metrics can be misleading, though: if you want to change jobs, you care more about "total number of other interesting opportunities in this one field" than "number of opportunities in this field compared to other fields."

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