New Yorkers flock to SF while locals flee for Seattle, says LinkedIn

The Sunnyvale-based, jobs-centric social network LinkedIn reported this month that San Francisco continues to siphon citizens from the East Coast, particularly New York City and Boston.

At the same time, we’re leaking locals to other tech-centric cities, though at a slower rate.

That was the takeaway from the site’s June workforce report, which measures which of the network’s users have taken news jobs and where.

“San Francisco Bay Area gained the most workers in the last 12 months from New York City, Boston, and Chicago,” according to the site. “For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in [the] San Francisco Bay Area, 5.67 workers moved to the city in the last year from New York City.”

The figures are 5.15 for Boston and 3.7 for Chicago. Meanwhile, Seattle gets 4.14 out of every 10,000 site members from San Francisco.

For Portland, it’s 3.95, and Austin 1.58.

Compared to, say, real estate site Redfin’s attempt to measure the same thing by surveying where users in different regions are shopping for new homes, we know that the job hoppers using LinkedIn actually did take the plunge and move.

But readers of these reports need to be cautious. As Geekwire declared, “LinkedIn maps out where new Seattleites are coming from,” but that’s not actually true. The site is only mapping where its own users come and go from.

Most (67 percent) LinkedIn users are between 24 and 54 years old, while 56 percent are male. So the report tells us from where certain kinds of people are moving.

Ken Kankavee

For example, the most popular industries on the site are financial and medical work, but skills like “healthcare,” “nursing,” and “negotiation” are among the ten least frequently cited by Bay Area residents.

Instead, all of the ten most commonly listed job skills by local users related to programming or web development, even though the site says only about 10 percent of its in users work in tech fields.

Also among the least commonly cited skills in the region: education, retail, and crime prevention.

Cities like Seattle and Portland are apparently also teeming with tech workers, so no surprise they’re the consistent leader in poaching Bay Area residents.

Meanwhile, over in New York, users are more likely to list theater arts and graphic design as their field than programming or development.

Even though we’re leaking these workers to other cities, and even though immigration from the East Coast is down from the beginning of the year (back in February, the rate per 10,000 workers who recently came from New York was 6.87 per 10,000), net migration remains up.

This despite the fact that LinkedIn says hiring overall is down four percent from last year.

As for exactly why people are moving out of San Francisco, here are a few reasons.

Roschetzky Productions

• June 2017 SF Report [LinkedIn]
• Movement Out Of California [Redfin]
• LinkedIn Maps New Seattlites [Geekwire]
• February 2017 SF Report [LinkedIn]
• Here’s why people plan on leaving San Francisco [Curbed SF]