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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 statistics as the definitive source.
In 2020 and 2021, media, investors, and CEOs claimed the Bay Area’s reign was ending. Tech exodus headlines noted remote work, high-profile moves, and office closures. NPR covered prominent tech executives moving to Texas and Florida, fueling a narrative that the Bay Area was losing its edge to cities like Austin and Miami (NPR, 2021). Many tech companies embraced “work from anywhere,” and falling city rents were seen as a sign of decline.
Some local reports, however, argued most tech talent was actually redistributing within the Bay Area, not leaving California altogether (KTVU).
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 state1. New York (the #2 market) had roughly 5,468 tech openings, while Texas had only about 2,0622. 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 states3. In other words, the Bay Area’s home state alone accounted for roughly a quarter of all software openings nationwide, 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. In May 2025, based on data from jobswithgpt.com, San Francisco had 444 software engineering openings and 546 AI/machine learning roles — underscoring its continued dominance in both areas. Austin followed with 69 software and 21 AI/ML listings. Miami showed 19 software roles and no dedicated AI/ML listings, suggesting minimal specialization in that sector.
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 Austin and a mere 19 in Miami. In machine learning and AI-related roles, the disparity was even more dramatic: 546 openings in San Francisco, compared to just 21 in Austin, and effectively none in Miami.
One key assumption 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)9. Many of those on-site jobs are concentrated in the Bay Area. 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.
By 2023, major firms in tech and other sectors increasingly required in-person attendance at least several days a week, as covered by NPR, 2023. This reversed much of the pandemic-era “remote forever” optimism and reinforced the advantage of regions with strong existing tech ecosystems.
Another overlooked factor is the surge of new startups and investment pouring into San Francisco post-pandemic. While other states, especially Texas and Florida, saw a brief surge in venture funding, that momentum has since cooled: as Crunchbase (Texas, 2024) reported, Austin’s VC funding has dropped below 2021–2022 levels. In contrast, the Bay Area remains unrivaled for tech and AI funding — securing over 70% of all North American AI startup funding as of 2025 (Crunchbase, 2025).
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 America. 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: Statistics from JobsWithGPT (AI-powered job aggregator) May 2025; media reports from NPR, 2021, KTVU, Crunchbase (Texas, 2024), Crunchbase, 2025, NPR, 2023. Prompted by human, compiled by AI.
