Hey there, it’s Andrea Guzman, Fortune’s tech fellow here to close out the week for you.
All eyes are on the state of once-booming tech hubs given the recent flood of tech layoffs and the rise of remote work. Bloomberg declared San Francisco is “showing signs of life” while the Wall Street Journal noted the city’s real estate market is picking up even with all the layoffs.
Office occupancy trends are important indicators of a city's economic health. San Francisco, at just 45% office occupancy after companies like Slack announced plans to get rid of their headquarters, make some people think a comeback is far off.
But there’s some hope for metros like San Francisco as workers look for new opportunities. As my colleague Michal Lev-Ram recently reported, laid-off workers are still in high demand, but not by the obvious suspects:
“There’s another type of organization that’s attracting some of the laid-off tech talent: tech companies that don’t often make headlines. They’re big, but their lower profiles can make it more difficult to compete for talent against buzzier names in social media and fintech. ‘I’m hearing a lot of interest in places like Intuit and Adobe,’ says Jana Rich, founder and CEO of Rich Talent Group, an executive recruiting firm, referring to the tax-software maker and the company behind tech tools like Photoshop.”
It’s companies like these that are catching the eyes of many freshly laid-off workers like Ashley Davis, who was a recruiting coordinator on contract at Google’s Austin office for nearly two years until she was let go as part of her company's recent job cuts.
Her layoff came as a surprise. One day her lead told her she was doing a great job and to keep it up and the next morning she couldn’t log into her devices and was only notified of the layoff via email later in that afternoon. “I won’t say it didn’t sting,” she said.
But when I talked to her this week, she was feeling optimistic, and she believed that everything would work out. Davis told me that she had always wanted to work in tech, and her passion started with an internship at LinkedIn before her freshman year of college. Her plan is to stay in Austin, even if it means switching from a high-profile tech firm to a quieter one, or even a startup. It’s a tradeoff she’s willing to make to continue a career in tech and stay in the city she’s called home for years.
Many others could be on the same track. As Wired noted this week, some of the most well-known one-time startups like WhatsApp, Square, and Slack emerged during a recession. And even in Big Tech, there are some signs of future hiring. Construction filings earlier this year show Apple intends to build a $240 million development in Austin, and earlier this week, Tesla announced plans to open new engineering headquarters in Palo Alto.
“I'm looking at it as just the climate right now, but I know it won't always be that way,” Davis said. “And I think lots of reorganization is happening, things are shifting. So therefore a lot of companies are just like, ‘Let's just lay people off.’ But they still need people to do those jobs, and they're still going to come back, just painted a little differently.”
If Austin and other cities want to keep their momentum as tech hubs, they will need to retain workers like Davis. After all, tech hubs face increasing competition. Since the pandemic, many smaller cities have attracted legions of techies who have switched to remote work. Smaller cities are also benefiting from the many non-tech companies that are stocking up on tech workers, who were once difficult-to-attract but are now hunting for jobs.
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Andrea Guzman
