The Seattle metro area accounted for 16.9 percent of the open software-related jobs posted on Glassdoor’s website on June 1. Silicon Valley — including the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas — came in at 16 percent.
Seattle is home to more open software jobs than Silicon Valley, accounting for one out of every six postings in the U.S.
The data, the latest evidence of the scale of the technology boom that is reshaping Seattle, come from Glassdoor, and reflect a snapshot last month of the listings gathered by the website for job seekers and workplace reviews.
The Seattle metropolitan area accounted for 16.9 percent of the open software-related jobs on June 1, Glassdoor says. Silicon Valley — including the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas — came in at 16 percent.
Silicon Valley’s technology sector is still far larger than Seattle’s by most metrics, however, including employment, headquarters of major companies, and venture-capital investment in technology firms.
But Seattle has been closing the gap, led by Amazon.com’s hiring binge. The e-commerce and cloud-computing giant employs more than 30,000 people in Seattle.
Many, but not all of them, work in software-development roles.
“The elephant in the room is Amazon,” Glassdoor Chief Economist Andrew Chamberlain said. “The massive growth of their business is changing the landscape of the whole tech-labor market, and it’s turning Seattle into a magnet.”
The growth continues. On Tuesday, Amazon’s careers page listed 8,135 postings in the area. Seattle is also home to engineering outposts of Silicon Valley stalwarts including Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, and, in Redmond, Microsoft’s headquarters.
In June 2012, Seattle accounted for 10.2 percent of the software-related job postings on Glassdoor, and Silicon Valley totaled 23 percent.
In the most recent data, the Washington, D.C., area came in third in postings, followed by New York and Boston.
Amazon’s success has helped make the retail industry the fastest-growing employer of software developers, Glassdoor says. Retailers accounted for 13.9 percent of open software jobs in the U.S. in June, up from 6.4 percent in 2012.
Software-engineering jobs are also less concentrated in Silicon Valley than they used to be, Glassdoor’s Chamberlain said, with smaller, more affordable metropolitan areas expanding their technology clusters faster than the San Francisco Bay Area.
“You can write code from anywhere,” he said. Companies could set up offices in places like Raleigh, N.C., for a fraction of the cost of San Francisco, for instance.
Detroit, Denver and Austin saw some of the largest increases in software hiring in the last five years, according to Glassdoor data.
Glassdoor’s report based its search totals on jobs with “software” in the title.