Seems like a misleading chart since there are both a left side and right side scale. I can’t tell which is which but my guess is it’s to make Texas stand out more.
Oof, that's a pretty criminal chart. The axes both have different 0 points and have different scales.
The statistics indicate that Texas's share rose 1 percentage point from 7% to 8% across the entire chart, while California's rose about 4 percentage points from 16% to 20% before falling 2 percentage points to 18%. The lines do not want you to believe that.
(FWIW, I'm not even entirely certain I know what these percentages are of--the numerator seems to be tech jobs within a state, but is the denominator all tech jobs in the country, or is it all jobs within the state?)
Do I understand the graph correctly that the share of tech jobs in california fell from ~10.5% to ~8.7% while in the same time it 'rose' from ~7.3% to ~7.7% in Texas? Or how are the two different Y Axis supposed to be interpreted?
It's not you, it's a bad graph for several reasons: The Y axes are not anchored at zero, a tactic used to exaggerate small changes (and noise). The Y axes do not start in the same place, and are not even on the same scale, meaning there is no actual (visual) relation between the two sets of data.
This is graph is basically How to Lie with Statistics 101. The author seems to be trying to show a correlation where one might not exist.
(Edit: There is also a footnote saying that they're lumping in movie-making, music recording, and television/radio broadcasting into their definition of "tech." Further reason to not really take this seriously.)
Be interesting to see other countries in the chart as well to see if there's any bleed from the US abroad, because India, Eastern Europe and others are really hot for US offshoring.
I remember following the 2008 crash when layoffs happened in US companies (usually the highly paid senior ones) and then those same positions got relocated to my city in Eastern Europe (and other countries) for a fraction of the wages. The exec who lead that probably got a good bonus for this move.
I feel the same pattern might be repeating again, especially with remote work being more normalized now in some companies, and the talent pool abroad being bigger and more upskilled now than it was in 2009 along with increased English fluency.
Your not wrong but I think its two fold. Off shoring and near shoring.
2000-2008 I think was more of outsourcing. Companies dipped their toes in the water and tried to get low cost labor through third party companies. I think generally this does not work.
Now we have companies that off shore with full company offices in those regions like India. This can work.
On top of that you near shoring companies in Mexico and further south that can provide you lower wage engineers but that work in your timezone.
>near shoring companies in Mexico and further south that can provide you lower wage engineers but that work in your timezone
Time zone is not a big road block. Some devs in EE will accept to work in the evening to overlap with the US time, because they get paid 2x-3x the local take-home market rate, so it makes it worth their while.
Obviously it's easier timing wise for those on the Latin American continent, but mucho dinero is a good motivator for everyone, especially if they also happen to be night owls.
Sure some devs do it. But there are large companies across Mexico and South America that have a huge number of willing and able devs within the same time zone. This means you can easily supplement your existing dev teams with individuals in the same time zone. Time zone matters when you are wanting devs to be part of your existing teams.
Also, this is starting to happen for other non software and related engineering fields as well. Eventually I wonder if the U.S. government will have to step in.things that do not require us licensing are being near shored.
There's better numbers in the "CompTIA State of the Tech Workforce 2024".
California is still adding tech jobs (although only 471 last year), but not as much as other states:
Headline unsupported by evidence. Share of tech jobs is not total tech jobs. It's more plausible that tech job growth in Texas is faster but tech job in CA are still growing.
To those critiquing the chart: I think the maliciousness will depend whether this was targeted at average readers or people with a statistical background.
The way I look at it, using real scale won't make the data visible. Texas will look like a line at the bottom while the trend for California won't be accentuated.
But then, the author used the title "Tech Jobs Leaving California" while not providing the exact numbers; as it's possible that tech jobs increased while their share decreased. So maybe he does have a political bias...
