Silicon Valley layoffs as a hiring opportunity for IT developers/city economic development elsewhere

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article, "Philly employers are desperately seeking tech workers even as Silicon Valley giants are laying off thousands," making the point that despite the massive layoffs at software technology firms in California and Washington, there remains plenty of demand for developers at firms in places like Philly.  From the article:

Locally, “tech jobs” have generally been safe from cuts, he explained, because they tend to be focused on maintenance or development of current products. In that way, Philadelphia is different from Silicon Valley, where many technologists are doing research and development and other speculative work, Wink said, which might get de-emphasized in a recession.

... The Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia is working on a campaign to attract and retain tech talent in the city. A shortage of tech talent exists in most places, said Sarah Steltz, the chamber’s vice president of economic competitiveness, and Philadelphia wants to welcome displaced tech workers who may have been laid off.

“Philadelphia has not had the same profile of being a tech ecosystem” as some other cities, Steltz said. But local companies now see “a unique opportunity to try to build the concentration of tech talent we have here in our region.” ...

Multiplier effect

A recent report from Technical.ly titled “A Way Forward: What’s really holding back diversity in tech?” explained that while Greater Philadelphia’s tech ecosystem is relatively small, employing just 3.7% of area workers, it is important because each tech job created supports 4.4 other local jobs. That effect is lost, however, if the employees don’t spend any of their time in the region where their employer is based, Wink said.

Sure they won't make quite as much, but the cost of living is likely significantly less and there can be other quality of life improvements as well.

This could have positive impact on local economic development in the same way that Pfizer's dumping of a major research facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan led to the strengthening of the biotechnology business sector there, with almost as many employed as before, but spread across many more companies, and in a manner where more steps of the value chain remain in Ann Arbor.

-- "How the closure of a Pfizer research center in Ann Arbor, Michigan led to the development of a biotech sector there ," 2021
-- " AI and agglomeration/cluster development ," 2021