Back in 90ies, the real estate market in SD was just barely recovering from a very large recession that happened in SoCal, primarily in the L.A. and S.D. areas with a heavy concentration of defense contractor businesses that vaporized…
Around that time Irwin Jacobs started Qualcomm and brought 4000+ jobs to San Diego and made san diego a wireless/telco center, with a bunch of other telco’s that followed….Back then we had the same problem. While we had a lot of job openings, very few of the local employee pool in SD were qualified to do the work. So we had to hire outside and convince people to come here. They did come. From all over the US and overseas. And they filled those open jobs….
Forget about Qualcomm right now, and there 20k+ employees. Let’s talk about Amazon, Walmart Labs, Google, and now Apple who have decided to expand their footprint also in San Diego….
20 years ago, I would have said the high tech, high paid jobs in san diego were next to non-existance, unless you were a QC employee. Things are quite different now. In addition to Sorrento Valley and the Rancho Bernardo corridor, Carlsbad has also become a place where tech startups like to incubate, as two of my former employers were there. Yes, there is still a footprint of lower paid, older type of companies that are still stuck in the 80-90ies type of work and 80-90ies type of compensation. But that is slowly becoming less and less… I won’t even go into all the bio-tech and medical-tech companies that are starting (which unfortunately for me I am probably not qualified to work in)…There’s a boatload of opportunity there, and if you’re skills are in those area, it’s going to be a goldmine for you..I think bio-tech and medical-tech is even stronger here in SD than in Bay Area. I don’t see Illumina going anywhere soon, nor any of their offshoots.
IT bell weathers are also pretty solid now here in SD. One of my old colleagues founded the Service Now office here in SD. They have a pretty big footprint. Walmart Labs is also pretty much here to stay and giving Amazon a pretty good run for their money. 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that because my understanding was the Walmark Labs mobile team was tasked with just maintaining deprecated app and so I didn’t decide to join that team… I think they’ve moved beyond that there seems to be a lot of innovation happening both in Sunnyvale and Carlsbad.
I think there will be some people that leave SD due to the changing industry and those who can’t take advantage of the new opportunities and also who have not taken steps to peg their living costs earlier as the cost of living start to rise here. Double edge sword of better opportunities for people with skills and that brings more money into the region which in term probably will drive up living costs more which in turn while put more pressure on those who have not fixed their living costs and also unable to take advantage of the changing/new opportunities…those people probably will have no choice but to leave…
