It’s kind of like a family gathering over the holidays. Get ’em together and the comparisons are inevitable.
“Cybercities: A City-by-City Overview of the High-Technology Industry,” contrasts the top 60 spots in the United States hosting high-tech companies.
The December report is a project of the Nasdaq Stock Market and the trade association AeA. Many know AeA by its former name, the American Electronics Association.
Like 59 other cities in the report, San Diego has a page to itself, laying out statistics on salaries, job growth, venture capital investment, housing costs and a variety of other things.
By sheer accident of the alphabet, San Francisco is on the facing page. It’s as good a place as any to start making comparisons.
High-tech jobs: San Diego, 60,000; San Francisco, 62,200.
Percentage of private-sector workers in high-tech jobs: San Diego, 6.5; San Francisco, 6.9.
Hey, these places sound real similar.
Average high-tech salary: San Diego, $53,000; San Francisco, $78,400.
High-tech payroll: San Diego, $3.2 billion; San Francisco, $4.9 billion.
Hmmmm. Obviously spoke too soon.
Cities with high-tech work forces of 15,000 or more made the report.
The document ranks San Diego third among those cities in consumer electronics manufacturing, with 4,000 such jobs, behind New York and Los Angeles.
It’s not hard to spend the better part of an hour flipping back and forth through the report, comparing the 60 cities.
Seattle, for example, offered an average high-tech wage of $129,300 during 1998. That beat San Jose’s wage of $85,100, and San Diego’s wage of $53,000.
By contrast, average wages in the private sector work force were: Seattle, $40,400; San Jose, $52,300; and San Diego, $31,300.
You might want to grab an Atlas while thumbing through the report. Especially if you can’t place Ada and Canyon counties in Idaho.
That’s the area around Boise, which has the ninth highest concentration of high-tech workers in the nation. That is, for every 1,000 private sector workers , from cooks to carpenters to snowboard purveyors , 112 worked in high-tech.
By that measure, San Diego ranked 26th, with 65 workers out of 1,000 involved in high-tech. Beating out San Diego were places like Ventura County; Huntsville, Ala.; and greater Poughkeepsie , Dutchess County, N.Y.
Roll those three areas together, though, and you won’t get the sheer number of high-tech jobs here in San Diego County.
Kevin Carroll, executive director for AeA’s local chapter, said there are a few things to remember about the survey.
For one, the numbers are conservative.
It does not count San Diego’s biotech jobs.
What’s more, numbers are current for the last quarter of 1998 and first quarter of 1999. “That’s the latest anyone has,” Carroll said of the government data that goes into the study.
As a result, wireless and telecom jobs that appeared later than that do not show up in the numbers.
One more thing to keep in mind is that the report compares metropolitan areas. For purposes of the survey, San Diego is the whole county. San Francisco is considered with Marin and San Mateo counties.
Which may explain one of the report’s more creative assertions about quality of life.
San Diego ranks as the third sunniest cybercity out of 60. San Francisco ranks fifth.
If I didn’t know they defined “San Francisco” as a three-county area, I would say the researchers had not taken enough chilly walks under gray skies at Golden Gate Park.
The Cybercities report is available by calling AeA at (800) 284-4232 or (408) 987-4200. The cost is $95 for AeA members and $190 for nonmembers.
Graves’ column appears weekly. Write him at bgraves@sdbj.com.
