Comment by tdeck 4 days ago
If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).
I agree with you that they're not small in absolute terms, but I think these offices wouldn't make the mental list of top 4 tech employers in the Bay Area, and there's a very steep drop off after that. Maybe it would be better to say it feels like there are 4 big employers and almost nothing after that. All of this is hard to research - I tried doing some googling for numbers to validate my gut feeling but I wasn't sure how reliable they are.
Seattle metro is also a lot smaller than Bay Area metro -- and the Bay is probably the densest of all tech areas.
That said, Seattle does also have a good collection of "minor" companies, such as PACCAR, Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, F5. And I think Apple also has an office in Seattle (although probably really small).
Unless you want to work for one of the "brands", there are some good choices in Seattle.
Not as much of a monoculture as Portland. Portland has Intel (where they are in the process of laying off tens of thousands of people), Nike (where they just went through layoffs and aren't hiring), and... not much else.
Portland is a lot smaller of a place than people would think. Outsized cultural impact. Seattle too, though Seattle has kept pace as MS and Amazon skyrocket.
I'm not so sure, other than Nike, Intel, a small Google office and a couple of other satellite offices I've seen, I don't feel the tech scene here is very big. Soo many companies cratered over the pandemic and it didn't really recover, and now Portland Metro has real visibility and desirability issues, and Oregon itself as a state hasn't exactly made it easier to get business up and going here.
I'm actually worried, as a resident of the Portland metro, about this, because I'm getting closer and closer to the point where my salary is large enough that fewer and fewer businesses can employ me just at my current compensation let alone raises etc.
I'm actually worried I have a large set of golden handcuffs on my hands here
Theres more to Seattle than that. But Amazon and Microsoft are HUGE so they are a very disproportionate amount of the people you’ll meet.
The upside is you don’t have to live in the Bay Area! Couldn’t pay me enough to move down there.
I think there's tons of companies in Seattle, but the sheer size of Amazon and Microsoft skew the distribution massively. I've spent my whole career so far ignoring the big companies you mention. There's lots of engineers working at the big names but there are also hundreds of smaller companies in the area.
All I can say is that while there are such companies you never seen to meet them. In the Bay Area we have tens of thousands of people at Google, Apple, Salesforce, etc.., but I would constantly meet people from random smaller and medium size companies and it doesn't feel the same here in Seattle. I think this is partly due to funding and partly due to how people seem to be more risk averse here.
This makes me sad because I've been trying to move to Seattle from Madison, WI for years and was hoping the startup market would be better out there
I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I actually miss the Madison tech scene.
Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.
Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.
Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
> If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
I'm looking for the same thing, maybe we can compare notes!
I've been going to the Capitol Hill Tool Library lately, which is my local makerspace. The space is small but they have a lot of traffic and people are generally very friendly and helpful. Also they have woodworking tools which I would never have in my apartment.
In terms of makerspaces specifically I imagine the limiting factor is rent. When rent is too high you end up with a smaller space and less cash left over for equipment.
Yeah, the cost of facilities is real. The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one. Unfortunately that would be pretty much impossible here without support from a huge tech company or something.
Out of curiosity I looked at the cost of a rental industrial space in SoDo and the prices absolutely blew my hair back.
Not exactly Seattle, but the Bellevue library has a makerspace — https://kcls.org/bellevuemakerspace/
That's very interesting to hear. I wonder if Madison has a Linux/Unix users group. I 100% agree on the makerspace front. I actually worked with one of the founders of The Bodgery for awhile, despite not being my thing it sounds like a great place.
> I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison
Probably, but also costs are quite a bit lower (they're much closer to Denver CoL if you can believe that). We have a pretty good amount of startups and a lot more "bigger" non-tech companies than you'd expect.
I agree on the funding trough, but I think that's really the macro-economics at play. Midwest is pretty well shielded from that, so I'm kinda happy I'm here for the time being.
If by "very small" you mean two 12-story office towers in South Lake Union, then yeah.
But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.
Google and Meta have thousands of SWEs and multiple buildings up here, I don't know if I'd call that a smaller presence. Smaller than the bay area, sure, but still a major employer.