1/ People often ask if it's worth it for companies to have an HQ in Silicon Valley. Real estate is crazy expensive here, salaries are astronomical as a result, there's heavy rush hour traffic, and so on. Why do companies put up with this??

One answer: an abundance of top talent.

2/ To take a data-driven approach, I used LinkedIn to count the number of people with different job titles in 4 metro areas: Houston, Atlanta, Toronto, and SF. Each of these has roughly 6 million people, so I would expect them to have similar amounts of tech talent.

3/ Caveat: a) this is not *super* scientific and b) these are searches from my LinkedIn account, so maybe the numbers will vary for different users. Regardless, I believe the numbers paint a strong picture.

4/ HOUSTON
DevOps = 270
VP of Engineering = 798
Customer Success = 294
iOS Developer = 71
Sr Data Scientist = 73

5/ ATLANTA
DevOps = 924
VP of Engineering = 657
Customer Success = 1232
iOS Developer = 214
Sr Data Scientist = 125