Job Density and Why It Beats Job Count

The two cities, side by side

New York employs about 121,000 software developers at a median of $166,830. San Jose employs 87,350 at $213,110. New York has 38 per cent more of them and pays $46,280 less in the middle.

If more jobs meant a better market, that would not happen. It happens because job count mostly measures how big a city is, and New York is big at everything.

The number that explains it

Take an occupation’s share of local employment and divide it by its share nationally. A result of 1.0 means the city has exactly its fair share. New York’s software developers come out at 1.18 — barely above average, because a metro of 9.4 million jobs holds a lot of everything. San Jose comes out at 7.23.

That is the difference between a city that happens to contain your work and a city built around it.

Why concentration pays and size does not

Employers have to compete for the same people. Where dozens of firms need one skill in one place, leaving is easy and keeping you costs money. Where one or two employers need it, they set the price.

The market survives any single employer. In a dense market, losing your job is an inconvenience and you interview down the road. In a thin one it can mean moving house.

Pay information circulates. People know roughly what others earn, because they know the others. That is the precondition for pay moving at all, and it does not exist where your occupation is scattered thinly across a big city’s economy.

The small places this reveals

Boulder, Colorado has a labor market of 178,320 — smaller than most people’s mental list of tech cities. Its concentration of software developers is 3.68, higher than San Francisco’s 2.72, with a median of $164,560.

The same pattern turns up everywhere once you look for it. Huntsville, Alabama concentrates aerospace engineers at 44 times the national rate. Morgantown, West Virginia concentrates registered nurses at 3.60. None of these places appears near the top of any ranking, because rankings sort by count and these are small.

Why every “best cities” list looks the same

Because they sort by absolute numbers, which returns the largest metros in the country whatever the occupation. A list that recommends New York, Los Angeles and Chicago for software, for nursing, for accounting and for logistics is not telling you about those professions. It is telling you those cities are big.

Doing the calculation yourself

You need three published numbers: your occupation’s employment in the metro, that metro’s total employment, and the same two nationally. Divide the first pair, divide the second pair, then divide one result by the other.

Above 1.0 and the place holds more of your work than its size implies. Above 2.0 and you are looking at a genuine specialist market. It takes a minute and it will point you at places no ranking will.

What count is still good for

Volume and variety. A large market has more openings in raw terms and more kinds of employer, which matters if you want optionality or you are changing sector. New York is not a bad place to be a developer; it is a place where being one is unremarkable, and the median reflects that.

The honest summary: count tells you how many doors there are, concentration tells you how hard anyone behind them will compete for you.

Density is why remote work did not flatten pay

The obvious prediction was that remote hiring would erase geographic pay differences: if location stops mattering, the San Jose premium should collapse toward the national median.

It largely has not, and concentration explains why. A dense market is not just a pile of jobs in one place — it is employers who compete with each other, colleagues who talk, and a salary level everyone in the market knows. Those survive the office closing. A company hiring remotely into that market is still hiring against those employers, and still has to pay in the neighborhood of what they pay.

The exception is the company that decides to price by the worker’s location rather than its own. That is the arrangement worth asking about explicitly before accepting a remote role, because the two policies produce very different numbers for the same job.

What to ask about a place before you commit

How many employers within commuting distance need what you do — not how many jobs exist, how many separate organizations. Three large employers and one dominant one are different markets even at identical concentration.

Whether the concentration comes from one industry or several. Software in San Jose spans hardware, platforms, finance and defense contractors; aerospace in a single-installation town does not. The first survives a downturn in any one sector and the second does not.

And whether the second career in your household has anywhere to go. A metro that is superb for you and thin for them is a worse move than a metro that is decent for both, and dual-career households are where the concentration calculation most often gets skipped.