There Are More Programming Jobs Than Ever Outside of Silicon Valley

For decades, the software industry has been synonymous with Silicon Valley. That’s an increasingly dated concept, as programming jobs have spread across the US and pooled in other metro areas in the country. Just as the work of Wall Street no longer happens just on Wall Street, programming is now happening all over the US.

Seattle is now the home of the greatest share of software-job openings, surpassing San Jose—the biggest city in Silicon Valley—according to data from Glassdoor. Seattle’s rise is fueled is by massive hiring at Amazon, which employs a total of 25,000 in the city, and continues to expand. But other cities have seen their share of software-job listings grow, too, including Washington, DC; Detroit; Denver; and Austin, Texas.

To compile the data, Glassdoor compared the change in the number of job postings on its site from 2012 to 2017 for 30 cities with at least 100 job openings with “software” in their title.

The rise of programming jobs in other cities isn’t coming at San Jose’s expense. Software jobs (not just openings) there climbed 36 percent, to 79,000, from 2012 to 2016, according to federal jobs data, outstripping the 15 percent growth of programming jobs nationally. In other words, Silicon Valley isn’t slowing down; the rest of the nation is just speeding up.