The right-wing Big Tech executives saw an exodus on the horizon, saying talent would start fleeing the Bay Area because of the state’s progressive policies. They were right; the brain drain has come. Tech talent is leaving Silicon Valley and its progressive policies… and moving to communist New York City and Mayor Mamdani.
According to a report from investment firm CBRE, the Big Apple is now the Big Apple (like the company), surpassing the Bay Area in most tech talent for the first time. According to the analysis, New York has surged to 394,300 tech workers, gaining 30,640 between 2022 and 2025. During that same period, San Francisco slipped to 375,730, contracting by 23,900 over the last three years.
In defense of the Bay, it still holds the top spot in CBRE’s “Tech Talent Scorecard Ranking,” which takes into account things like talent quality, recent graduates joining the industry in the city, and average salaries. But New York is growing. It was the third-largest gainer in tech workers (trailing Toronto and the Dallas-Ft. Worth area), and it’s seen a post-pandemic surge of tech drawn to the city, likely in part due to the proximity of other industries that it is getting tangled up with—particularly finance.
You’d assume the AI boom would be driving up San Francisco’s numbers. While the city is still pulling in plenty of talent, particularly in the emerging industry, those additions apparently have not been enough to counter the tech-xodus—not driven by Big Tech being done with woke, but by massive, post-Covid layoffs.
Layoffs.fyi has tracked tech employees getting let go since 2022 and has amassed more than 833,000 total cuts in that time. Now, not all of those are Silicon Valley-based companies or employees, but it does speak to the general state of the industry, which has been in belt-tightening mode for the last few years. And of course, when the belt gets tightened, it’s the workers who feel it first.
Much to the chagrin of those big-brained executives who said it’s time to get out of California, their favored destinations have not exactly taken off. Austin, Texas, the latest preferred landing spot for these companies, still sits a distant fifth behind San Fran, Seattle, New York, and Toronto on CBRE’s rankings. Miami, the choice of the crypto bros, doesn’t even rank, presumably because Keith Rabois seems like an awful hang.
New York, meanwhile, is using tech’s newfound appreciation for Gotham to extract some concessions. Mayor Mamdani recently backed a city council proposal that would require Amazon and other companies to reclassify contractors performing last-mile deliveries as employees. That’s just the cost of doing business in the Greatest City in the World.
