Summary: During the pandemic (2020–2024), conventional wisdom and media narratives predicted the downfall of San Francisco’s tech industry. Observers pointed to the rise of remote work and an alleged mass migration of tech workers to “hot” new hubs like Miami and Austin. But fresh data from 2025 tells a very different story. San Francisco not only remains the nation’s leading tech employment center – it dominates in software and AI job openings, especially for in-person roles. This report juxtaposes early-pandemic predictions with the 2025 reality, using jobswithgpt.com job listing aggregate statistics as the definitive source.
In 2020 and 2021, a chorus of investors, CEOs, and journalists proclaimed that the Bay Area’s reign was ending. Headlines warned of a “Silicon Valley exodus”, as high-profile founders decamped for Florida and Texas. The San Francisco Chronicle noted “bleak” economic signals – plunging rents, record moving-truck rentals – and “a few high-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneurs loudly making noise on their way to Florida or Texas”1. Remote work was widely expected to level the playing field: if engineers could work from anywhere, why stay in San Francisco? By April 2023, even the Washington Post wrote that “the region’s dominance has declined since the pandemic, as lenient remote work policies and a spate of layoffs… fueled the departures of workers and cleared the way for rising investment in other tech hubs… notably Austin and Miami”2.
These narratives fed a popular storyline: San Francisco was supposedly “dead” as a tech center, eclipsed by upstart cities with lower costs and fewer restrictions. Miami’s mayor courted founders on Twitter, Austin’s booming influx made headlines, and investors mused that the next Silicon Valley might not be in California at all. By 2021, anecdotes of an SF tech exodus were everywhere.3 – bolstering the notion that the Bay Area’s decades-long network effect had finally broken. But was this really the end of San Francisco’s tech dominance?
Fast-forward to 2025, and the dire predictions appear misaligned with the facts. According to data from jobswithgpt.com – an AI-powered job aggregator that tracked over 45,000 U.S. software job openings in May 2025 – San Francisco is indisputably still the nation’s tech jobs capital. The site’s analysis shows that California is the single largest “hotspot” for software roles, with 12,562 openings – substantially more than any other state4. New York (the #2 market) had roughly 5,468 tech openings, while Texas had only about 2,06256. (Florida, despite the Miami hype, did not even crack the top tier – its share of software jobs was so small that it wasn’t listed among the top ten states7.) In other words, the Bay Area’s home state alone accounted for roughly a quarter of all software openings nationwide (12.5k out of ~45.7k89), affirming that the locus of tech employment remains firmly in the San Francisco orbit.
This dominance becomes even more apparent when comparing metro areas directly. Jobswithgpt’s city-specific listings show that San Francisco had far more tech job openings than Austin or Miami in 2025.
Drilling down to tech-specific roles further debunks the “tech migration” narrative. The table below highlights the number of job openings for general software engineering roles and for AI/machine learning roles in May 2025, as indexed by jobswithgpt for each city:
| Metro Area | Software Engineering Jobs | AI/Machine Learning Jobs |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco, CA | 44413 | 54614 |
| Austin, TX | 6915 | 2116 |
| Miami, FL | 1917 | 0* |
*Jobswithgpt’s Miami listings did not show an “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning” category at all, indicating very few dedicated AI/ML roles in that metro as of May 2025.
As shown above, San Francisco eclipses the upstart hubs by an order of magnitude in both traditional software developer openings and cutting-edge AI jobs. San Francisco had about 444 general software engineering positions listed, versus only 69 in Austin1819 and a mere 19 in Miami20. In machine learning and AI-related roles, the disparity was even more dramatic: 546 openings in San Francisco, compared to just 21 in Austin2122, and effectively none in Miami.
One of the key assumptions of the pandemic exodus narrative was that remote work had permanently weakened San Francisco’s pull. Yet the 2025 evidence indicates that in-person clusters still matter – a lot. Out of 45,731 U.S. software job openings tracked in May 2025, only 9,617 (about 21%) were explicitly remote positions, while over 36,000 were tied to specific locations (on-site)25. Many of those on-site jobs are concentrated in the Bay Area. In fact, companies have been ramping up hiring for roles they expect to be filled in San Francisco, whether due to a preference for team co-location, the presence of their HQs, or the Bay Area’s deep talent pool. The notion that “everyone would just work from anywhere now” hasn’t erased the advantages of a dense tech ecosystem. San Francisco’s tech scene in 2025 is bustling with new office reopenings, meetups, and collaborative activity that remote-only setups struggle to replicate.
Another overlooked factor is the surge of new startups and investment pouring into San Francisco post-pandemic. The same Washington Post article that acknowledged rising investment in Austin and Miami also noted that those regions “still pale in comparison to Silicon Valley,” which in 2022 attracted $74.9 billion in venture funding – roughly 15 times the funding that went to Miami that year2627. (Miami’s 2022 VC funding was $5.39 billion; Austin’s was $4.95 billion – both big jumps for those cities, but nowhere near the Bay Area’s dominance28.) Moreover, 86% of startups funded by top accelerator Y Combinator in 2022 were based in Silicon Valley29. This influx of capital and new companies has translated into job postings. The Bay Area’s early bet on emerging fields like AI is now paying off in employment: San Francisco’s hundreds of AI job listings likely stem from the many AI startups and research labs that have concentrated in the city since 2023. In short, the tech industry’s center of gravity did not shift as dramatically as the pandemic pundits predicted – if anything, San Francisco is humming with a new generation of startups alongside the established giants.
The narrative of San Francisco’s tech demise between 2020 and 2024 turned out to be largely a myth. Yes, the city endured a tough stretch – remote work did scatter some people, and secondary tech hubs like Austin and Miami enjoyed momentary booms. But the doomsayers’ confident predictions (“San Francisco is over” and “tech has moved to Miami”) have been soundly contradicted by the hard numbers in 2025. San Francisco not only maintained its lead – it towers over other regions in the number of software jobs, especially for the on-site roles that critics claimed would vanish. The early-pandemic perception was that an era had ended; the reality by 2025 is that San Francisco’s innovation ecosystem is unparalleled in its scale.
As the data from jobswithgpt.com demonstrates, the Bay Area remains the beating heart of tech employment in America3031. For every startup or investor that left California, many more either stayed or were created anew in San Francisco. The city’s infrastructure and talent network – decades in the making – proved far more resilient than a temporary work-from-home trend or a handful of headline-making departures. In the final analysis, rumors of San Francisco’s tech industry death were greatly exaggerated, and the city by the Bay continues to be, in absolute terms, the premier place for tech jobs in 2025.
Sources: Public Job Listing Aggregate data from JobsWithGPT (AI-powered job aggregator) May 20253233; contemporary media reports from 2020–2023 including SF Chronicle, Business Insider, and Washington Post.
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