America’s New Tech Hubs

Now organizations in sectors well beyond the pioneers in finance are investing in blockchain to protect data, decentralize processes and facilitate asset and data transfer.

“It’s an appealing model for many sectors, promising transparency and trust as it helps make value exchange possible,” says a SmartBrief article. Although focusing mostly on the financial sector, which is where blockchain found its earliest uses, the article mentions the steady creep of the technology into other industries and even slowly becoming commoditized as “blockchain as a service.”

“Amazon and Microsoft both currently offer BaaS, and enterprises as well as startups are taking advantage of it,” says SmartBrief. Citing a Gartner survey of CIOs, the article notes that “60% expected their firms to start or continue adopting blockchain-based technology between now and 2023.”

Earlier this year, Deloitte issued a blockchain trends report. Besides describing the evolving technology and the features each different approach offers, Deloitte found that some of the fastest growth in blockchain investments was coming in such unexpected industries as professional services – a sector that includes the staffing and employment industry – and energy and resources. In each of those 38% and 43% respectively of the firms surveyed were spending at least $5 million each on blockchain initiatives.

Not unexpectedly, the largest percentage of businesses investing in blockchain were in technology, media and telecom.

“More organizations in more sectors — such as technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, health care, and government — are expanding and diversifying their blockchain initiatives,” Deloitte observes.

Like the financial sector, life sciences and health care deal with highly sensitive medical data they must protect or face legal consequences. Those two sectors are where blockchain “can have a more immediate and meaningful impact,” says Deloitte. They are in an industry, the report explains, “In which data transparency, speed of access, immutability, traceability, and trustworthiness can provide the information necessary for life-altering decisions.”

Interestingly, Gartner assigns a similar importance – not life or death, but still vital – to blockchain’s value to media.

“Organizations and governments are now turning to technology to help counter fake news, for example, by using blockchain technology to authenticate news photographs and video, as the technology creates an immutable and shared record of content that ideally is viewable to consumers,” Gartner said.

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The pandemic shutdown has made relocating an easier decision for IT professionals living in the increasingly more expensive tech hubs of the nation.

With 61% of tech employees now working fully remotely because of COVID-19, a survey by .Tech Domains found the

vast majority of tech talent living within 30 miles of large tech centers are thinking of moving. Some already have.

“As Covid-19 accelerates remote work environments for the tech workforce, many are using the flexibility to pursue more affordable lifestyles,” says Suman Das, brand director at .Tech Domains.

Millennials are feeling the urge to relocate even more acutely than older tech workers. Younger and therefore less senior in both career and pay scale, the millennial professionals in the survey were 15% more likely to be thinking of relocating.

They’re also giving more thought to taking on gig jobs than ever before. While almost three-quarters of all full-time employees say they are more likely to freelance now than before the pandemic hit, 84% of millennial IT professionals say that.

Relocating to lower cost areas and picking up side work are considerations driven by any number of factors, but certainly worries about being laid off or furloughed are high among them.

When the tech-focused job site Hired surveyed 2,300 tech workers in July, it found large percentages of them “concerned” or “very concerned” about losing their job in the next several months. Among those in the San Francisco Bay Area, 53% expressed concern about being laid off. In New York, 42% shared that worry.

The worry is not unjustified. Technology firms in the Bay Area were quick to shed jobs in the early months of the pandemic shutdown. From a high of 130,400 employees in February, the information sector shed almost 13,000 jobs in less than two months.

Still, unemployment among tech workers nationally was 4.6% in August, well under the 8.4% nationally.

Photo by marek kizer

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