Austin isn't really a growth driver in tech as much as a place to go for the companies that are priced out of California. Come for the low taxes, stay for the non-existent labor law!
The NYTimes article on the study has more numbers. What's odd about DC is the number of losses seems high but it's hard to tell how big that is in proportion.
For example, Silicon Valley and San Francisco gained a huge number. However, Madison Wisconsin was in the top ten and is a much smaller metro area. Washington lost 7k but it's a big metro - especially compared to Wichita.
yeah, I had similar thoughts. Using absolute numbers makes sense of some cities, using the expansion over a tech base for others, and expansion over total base for yet others.
From the NYtimes piece it looks like they use absolute numbers but the study itself seems to run a mix of analyses including absolute, % change etc.
Their definition of an innovation job might have something to do with it, too.
In this case, I wouldn't be so quick to label your intuition "flat out wrong." I've seen multiple sources citing comparable "tech" job growth in NYC to SF (the city, not the region), with more than double Boston's job growth in the last decade(ish). I'd question the reliability of this data that NYC isn't even in the top 5.
I'm also partially surprised Austin isn't on the list... but then the majority of "tech jobs" in the area seem to be back-office work like sales, support, and HR... so maybe that's why it doesn't show up?
The tech culture in Austin is way overhyped. I came up in it, and the critical mass of investors just isn't there. There are a handful (like 10 at most) of serial founders in town who can reliably get VC funding. I worked for one of them at a couple companies, and while he was good at what he did, his relationships from being a trust fund kid hobnobbing with investors were absolutely the reason we had funding and traction. Everyone else competes for the local / regional VC network, which can't handle anything beyond A rounds.
Even Apple's huge new campus in Austin is going to be manufacturing, sales and customer support; the actual tech jobs are staying in Cupertino. It's just cheaper to hire for non-tech positions outside the bay area. So tech companies from the bay area use Austin as a tax haven to cut the costs of non-technical work, but the jobs aren't tech jobs.
I also wonder what that graph looks like. DC was a tech powerhouse for a while with dulles corridor and the likes of AOL et al. But I'm not exactly sure when that really dwindled. I could see something resembling a U shape from that going down but DC growing if you changed the starting date a little later. Just throwing it out there, and Amazon will probably increase those numbers. The city's tech growth may not be stunning but the city itself is growing and there's definitely no shortage of money.
I think for LA and NYC they start from a much bigger employment base and there are different trends in "tech", some going up, some going down. Like in LA a lot less manufacturing and aerospace (did you know LA county was #1 in both for a while?) and more VC style tech. NYC probably has similar trends I wouldn't know as well.
It just goes to show you that our intuitions about some of these things are flat out wrong.