i3 | June 02, 2022

Tech Hub: Seattle

As Seattle has established itself as a so-called “superstar” city among established tech hubs across the nation, recent reports are highlighting how the pandemic has helped it and other cities attract a growing share of tech talent.

According to CBRE’s 2021 Scoring Tech Talent report, Seattle remains a top destination for job seekers, particularly college graduates. Companies like Amazon, Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft first helped to build Seattle’s reputation, but the region has since attracted dozens of top companies. It also has seen the rise of large tech companies such as Expedia, Tableau, Zillow and Zulily.

With giants like Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Twitter and others setting up their engineering offices in the city, Seattle truly is a tech hub. There also are smaller tech companies like Auth0, RealSelf, Remitly, Rover, SkyKick and TUNE that are transforming cyber-security, business operations, IoT development and gaming through cutting-edge technologies.

The Scoring Tech Talent report used various metrics to analyze and rank each of the top tech markets across the country. Among the metrics were data points like labor pool quality, affordability and diversity. The top five areas with the highest rankings, included the San Francisco bay area, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Toronto and New York City.

A March 2022 report from the Brookings Institution finds remote work is changing the idea that all tech jobs must be concentrated in traditional hubs in metro areas. The report identifies eight established, and growing hubs with Seattle coming in at number five:

1. San Jose
2. New York
3. San Francisco
4. Washington, DC
5. Seattle
6. Boston
7. Los Angeles
8. Austin

According to Brookings, a distribution of tech jobs is in emerging markets, including smaller towns, which the report refers to as “quality-of-life meccas” where amenities are key, or “zoom towns,” where work can be accomplished remotely using digital tools.

Seattle, known as the Emerald City, is America’s most desired destination for college graduates, according to the 2022 Axios-Generation Lab Next Cities Index, which tracks rising U.S. work and culture trends through geographic preferences. Axios cites the city’s “superstar tech hub status, cool climate, green-energy embrace and music and art scene” in helping it compete with destinations such as New York, L.A., Denver and Boston.

“It feels like a young-person city,” Riley Harbick, a computer science major and senior at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA told Axios. He said he wants to move to Seattle when he graduates. Half of the survey’s 2,109 respondents want to live outside of their home states after graduation; about one in four want to live in their hometowns. The top five wish list, according to Axios, is Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles, Denver and Boston.

The Seattle Innovation Hub: Leading Disruption

Immersive ideation and co-creation are the focus at this center. Accenture’s Innovation Architecture allow companies to ideate, prototype and scale innovation to create transformative customer experiences, re-think a product or service and learn to lead a more agile organization. They can tap into a network of startups or build on the technologies of enterprise partners such as Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, collaborate with teams of engineers, designers and developers and co-create through design thinking workshops. The hub allows clients to turn ideas into reality with rapid prototyping to quickly evaluate, iterate and improve.

Fjord Design Studio

Using human-centered design to reimagine and redefine people’s relationships with the digital and physical worlds.

Avanade Digital Innovation Studios

Combining the power of people and the Microsoft ecosystem to transform businesses for the digital world.

Liquid Studio

Helping business move rapidly from idea to action, turning concepts into prototypes using AI, the internet of things and modern engineering.

Learn more about the Seattle Innovation Hub.