UPDATED 11:58 EST / APRIL 22 2016

NEWS

Survey finds tech professionals are a footloose bunch

Watch out San Francisco; New York is out to get you.

At least that’s what it would seem from the opinions expressed by users of the anonymous tech recruiting site Woo. The startup munged through the profiles of 5,000 of its users to find out what technology professionals care about, where they want to live, how much money they expect to make and other work-related issues.

Unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area was considered the most desirable location for tech jobs, but not by much. New York was ranked as a favored spot by 48.7 percent of users, not far behind San Francisco’s 53.4 percent. Seattle also put in a strong showing, with nearly one-third of tech pros hankering for the tall pines. Overall, 38 percent of respondents said they want to move somewhere else.

Bay Area dwellers also choose location as their most important job priority, while the rest of the country favored big bucks. Among the 29 percent of San Franciscans who said they’re looking to relocate, New York was the preferred destination for nearly half.

And speaking of bucks, salary expectations were down over the fourth quarter of 2015. Tech professionals sampled in the first quarter said they expected to make a shade over $124,000 a year on average, compared to $142,000 the previous quarter. Layoffs and the softening market for venture capital and IPOs probably played a role in the dropoff.

But that doesn’t mean they want to work harder. The percentage of users who listed work-life balance as important grew to 22.3 percent in the first quarter of this year from 14 percent the previous quarter. Still, that means more than three-quarters don’t think balance is important. More than 82 percent of tech pros said they want to work at large companies, compared to 76.5 percent who said they were open to the startup life. Although Woo lacks much historical data, it’s safe to assume that a poll of tech workers a generation earlier would have shown much less interest in entrepreneurship.

If you need any further evidence of the ascendancy of JavaScript, you can see it in the list of technologies that were mentioned most often. Java was first, followed closely by two JavaScript-related frameworks: NodeJS and AngularJS. Microsoft’s .Net and and Python rounded out the top-five list.

Sectors most in demand were big data, health, finance, gaming and mobile, but the vertical industry dispersion is wide, indicating that techies are less interested in what the business does than in the quality of their work.

You can download a PDF of all the findings here.

The Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based Woo, which has raised $2.35 million in seed funding, has signed on more than 100 employers, including Adobe Systems Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and AOL Inc., Kotzer said. The service is free to job-seekers and employers pay only when a match is made.


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