Texas still lags other big states - it mentions California, New York and Virginia - in both the number of high tech workers and the amount of their pay.
Tech workers in California, for instance, commanded an annual average of almost $32,000 more. Whether that’s an advantage depends on your point of view: Startups here pay considerably less for labor (as well as real estate), but they also see a lot of top talent bolt for higher pay on the east and west coasts.
While high-tech is big in Texas, we should be striving to make it a lot bigger. Last week’s billion-dollar sale of the young blogging platform Tumblr was the latest reminder of the industry’s huge upside.
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Other locales have turned more aggressive. In New York, where Tumblr is based, private and public leaders have pledged billions for campuses, office space and other initiatives to create a high-tech challenger to Silicon Valley. Venture capital has poured into the New York area (while it declined elsewhere, including here) and seed accelerators have multiplied. Both help speed the development of startup companies.
Cities and states always ask how to get more high-tech companies, said Matthew Kazmierczak, a researcher at the TechAmerica Foundation and author of the group’s annual Cyberstates report, which chronicles the industry’s job growth. He emphasizes a large labor force with the right skills.
“That’s often tied to good universities and research centers,” he said. “They fuel the pipeline of ideas.”
So the point seems to be that Texas lags behind other states because our state and local governments do not make the necessary investments to lure and incubate them. The relatively low number of tier one universities is one example. This makes it less likely that research will be conducted here:
. . . jobs in R&D remain a weakness in Texas’ tech story. From 2009 to 2012, the state lost 600 workers in research, according to TechAmerica. Over the same time, Texas employers added 19,000 jobs in computer system design and 5,000 in engineering services.
Just 7 percent of Texas tech jobs are in research and testing labs, compared with 12 percent nationwide. The share of R&D jobs in California, New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania is at least twice as high as in Texas.
Texas’ tech workforce is larger than every state, except California. But New York and the mid-Atlantic region, led by the Virginia area near Washington, have been coming on strong. Last year, even after solid growth, Texas was still about 7,000 jobs shy of its peak tech employment in 2008. New York had 10,000 more tech workers than its pre-recession peak, and Virginia eclipsed its peak, too.
