What is WFH? It stands for “work from home”, whether home is in San Jose or Billings Montana. For San Fran this is a death sentence if the workers live far from their downtown San Fran offices. The workers will not buy coffee at the Starbucks on Market Street near Van Ness. Nor will they buy a burger a couple blocks for the Embarcadero. Never again will they buy soda, cigarettes or weed in San Fran.
While their employers will do well, hundreds of small business and office building owners will go down the toilet without their patronage.
“Eighty-one percent of tech job postings in San Francisco last year allowed working from home, new industry data shows. That dwarfs all other tech hubs, especially San Jose, where just 18% of 2021 job postings were for remote jobs.
“Among all tech job postings in 2021, 28% specified a WFH or hybrid work option, or slightly over 1 million job postings,” writes the nonprofit Computing Technology Industry Association in its new State of the Tech Workforce Report. But The City was way out in front of other tech hubs, no doubt in part due to our early-applied and only recently relaxed COVID-19 guidelines.
Study shows eye-popping percentage of S.F. tech jobs are now WFH
Data also shows top 10% of SF tech workers make average of $217K
By Jeff Elder, SF Examiner, 3/31/22
If you wondered just how work-from-home cozy San Francisco tech got last year, here’s an eye-popping stat:
Eighty-one percent of tech job postings in San Francisco last year allowed working from home, new industry data shows. That dwarfs all other tech hubs, especially San Jose, where just 18% of 2021 job postings were for remote jobs.
“Among all tech job postings in 2021, 28% specified a WFH or hybrid work option, or slightly over 1 million job postings,” writes the nonprofit Computing Technology Industry Association in its new State of the Tech Workforce Report. But The City was way out in front of other tech hubs, no doubt in part due to our early-applied and only recently relaxed COVID-19 guidelines.
The low Silicon Valley number may be due to jobs at big tech companies invested in large campuses. Seattle, with Microsoft nearby, had just 23% remote jobs among its postings, with Boston at 29% and Austin at 33%. Only San Diego was anywhere close to our WFH number, with 49% of its postings giving the option.
Here’s something else that jumps out: San Francisco is already booming in 2022 with job growth, which the report projects will be 4.3% this year – and that is the highest rate in the country. One big area of that growth is emerging tech, like AI and cryptocurrency. In fact emerging tech is the second-biggest job category in The City and in San Jose, behind only software engineering.
