Dive Brief:

• A report by job-matching website Hired found that those working in technology are looking beyond San Francisco as the best place to work and at other cities. In a survey of tech workers, Hired found that Seattle and Austin, TX were the most popular places to relocate to due in part to a lower cost of living, followed by Denver, Chicago and Atlanta. More than 700 survey responses were collected on Hired’s website.
• Salaries are rising in almost every local market for tech workers, including in the San Francisco Bay Area. While they dipped slightly in Boston, Denver and Paris, salaries spiked in the likes of Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, among others. Information on salaries reflects more than 420,000 interview and job offers from the past year through Hired’s platform of more than 10,000 participating companies and 69,000 job seekers.
• The report also found that transportation technology companies, which include the likes of ride-hailing apps as well as new delivery services and car leasing firms among others, pay on average $10,000 a year more than other tech industries. The transportation technology sector has an average salary of $145,000, right ahead of the education technology sector, which pays $135,000 on average.

Dive Insight:

San Francisco’s stranglehold on the tech industry continues to loosen as more and more cities position themselves as tech hubs and startup incubators. And while San Francisco continues to lead the way in the United States, the growth of cities like Austin and Seattle rather than established tech powerhouses like New York and Washington, D.C. is noteworthy.

"Job candidates are beginning to notice the perks of living and working in other cities," Hired CEO Mehul Patel wrote in a blog post on the survey’s findings. "When we surveyed our candidates, Seattle and Austin came out on top of the list of places they’d relocate — a fact likely attributed to each city’s growing tech community and lower cost of living."

That salaries are on average higher in transportation technology companies than any others reflects a trend in smart cities, where transportation continues to be a major innovator. Hired found that product management roles were offered the most on average, as more companies look for new solutions and ways to share rides, rent out cars and become less reliant on personal vehicles.

And companies put in the most requests for engineers on the back-end and front-end of their products, the report found, showing the rise of apps and internet-based products and the need to make them run as efficiently and reliably as possibly.