From Rain City to Crane City

Seattle's Bustling Tech Growth.

- Paul French

Over the past 10 years, Seattle’s overcast cityscape has become the epicenter of a major tech boom, with big names like Amazon, Adobe, and Facebook moving into the city where, decades ago, the Fortune 500 favorite Microsoft laid the groundwork. This migration of giants has spawned a rise of aspiring start-ups, resulting in an ecosystem of skilled workers and success stories.

This has given Seattle a powerful talent pool, one in which the big fish players can feed off the tech innovations of small startups, and, alternatively, one in which the abundance of these established companies provides a route to success for aspiring entrepreneurs.

For instance, even if your business venture fails at Startup X, you can rest easy knowing that the experience you’ve gleaned from your enterprise will make you a worthy candidate for work at, say, Google. And with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics citing Seattle’s mean salary for “Computer and Mathematics” workers at $107, 290 (an average second only to San Francisco), those who stay in this sector are likely to be well-compensated for their efforts.

In other words, there’s a reason why Fargo, ND isn’t a central tech hub (yet). Big tech residents support small tech residents, and, likewise, small tech residents support them. Of course, there are many other factors driving Seattle’s makeover -- major and minor alike (for example, the fact that the city shares California’s time zone makes it easier for company satellites to communicate with their headquarters back home).