California’s Tech Job Decline: Headed to Progressive Ruin

For decades, California has been globally synonymous with tech innovation, with San Francisco and Silicon Valley epicenter birthing giants like Apple, Google, Twitter/X and Meta. Yet, as of November 2025, dominance in the U.S. tech workforce is waning, with the share of national tech employment dipping below levels not seen since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

This is not a cyclical dip; it is falling apart, a structural unraveling, marked by net job losses, geographic dispersion, and missteps under Governor Gavin Newsom’s watch.

Compounded by Sacramento’s deeply progressive legislature, surging urban decay—especially persistent open-air drug markets in San Francisco despite Mayor Daniel Lurie’s efforts—and fiscal irresponsibility at both city and state levels, this decline in tech already threatens to relegate California from innovation vanguard to cautionary tale. The phenomenon signals a reconfiguration of America’s tech landscape, where the state’s high costs, regulatory rigidity, and politicized governance lost ground to more agile rivals like Texas and Florida.

The numbers paint a sobering picture. According to the CompTIA State of the Tech Workforce 2025 report California’s share of total U.S. tech employment—encompassing software developers, IT specialists, and data scientists—has contracted to approximately 16% as of mid-2025, the lowest in over a decade and trailing the 16% range from 2008–2010. Back then, the state was clawing back from the dot-com bust’s shadow amid the Great Recession. Fast-forward to today: U.S. tech employment peaked at around 6 million in 2023 but has since shed over 90,000 positions, per Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data.

California’s pre-pandemic 19% share in 2019, has borne a disproportionate brunt. From a mid-2022’s frenzy—when the state hit 531,000 tech sector jobs—it lost ~98,000 by early 2025, an 18% plunge returning totals to pre-COVID levels.

Figures underscore this reversal. Between early 2020 and mid-2022, California added 60,000 net tech jobs amid the remote-work boom. But from mid-2022 to mid-2025, job losses mounted to 71,000, with sub-sectors like web search portals (e.g., Google) and computer systems design leading the tech bleed, per BLS revisions.

In the Bay Area alone, tech employment contracted from 960,400 at its 2022 peak to 880,200 by late 2024, erasing pandemic gains. Statewide, 2025 has been brutal: over 118,000 U.S. tech layoffs, with more than half (~59,000) in California, hitting firms like Intel (5,000 cuts, mostly in the state), Meta, HP, and Salesforce. The Bay Area shed another 8,700 net tech jobs this past January–February 2025 alone.

This trend of job decline is no blip—it is a sustained contraction, accelerating despite an AI-fueled national rebound. CompTIA is projecting U.S. tech growth at 14% through 2032, adding ~1.1 million jobs overall, yet California’s slice of that pie may shrink further to potentially 14% by decade’s end.

Breakdowns reveal hotspots: San Francisco and San Jose have hemorrhaged since mid-2022, with losses easing but never halting. Revised data slashed prior growth estimates; what was once predicted as 814,000 net jobs added from 2022–2023 became 567,000, highlighting over-optimism in preliminary surveys. Nationally, tech postings fell 3% month-over-month in July 2025, but California’s postings—once leading—now trails Texas and Virginia. The result? A “tech recession” that began in late 2022, with layoffs at Amazon, Google, and Meta, has instead coalesced into dispersion: Texas’s share rose from 7% in 2010 to 10% today, siphoning jobs via lower costs and laxer rules.

Why California’s tech freefall? A convergence of economic, social, and policy pressures.

First, the post-pandemic hangover: Pandemic hiring spree was unsustainable, with firms doubling employee head counts relying on remote work. AI exacerbated this: While Artificial Intelligence’s generative tools promise efficiency, they have automated entry- and mid-level coding, slashing software engineer opportunities by 20% since October 2022, per Stanford research.

California’s revered AI hubs have not offset this loss; job postings for AI skills hit 125,000 nationally last May, 2025, but legacy roles like web dev and systems design—core to the state—cratered. AI is no savior for San Francisco’s broader economic woes; it creates high-value roles at firms like OpenAI and Anthropic but entirely fails to stem our city’s retail closures, office vacancies still at 35% in downtown SF, (In 2019, it was 4.7%), or the flight of mid-tier talent.

Geographic flight compounds the pain. Remote work enabled relocations, with 25% of departing tech workers fleeing to cheaper towns amid California’s astronomical costs: San Francisco rents surged 50% since 2010, and median home prices top $1.25 million. High state taxes—13.3% top income rate—drain high earners.

But the tech bro exodus is not just economic—it is cultural and political.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s highly politicized rhetoric, framing California as a moral counterweight to “red states,” has alienated business leaders. His 2024 State of the State address boasted of the “strongest economy in America” while dismissing critics as “doom-loop” peddlers, even as sobering federal data showed a 156,300 net job loss in H1 2024. Newsom’s administration has prioritized destructive progressive ideals over pragmatic governance, like championing sweeping climate mandates and DEI requirements that burden startups. The state legislature, dominated by ultra-progressive Democrats, has doubled down—passing laws like AB 5, crippling gig economy flexibility.

San Francisco, the symbolic heart of tech, continues to be a flashpoint. Despite Mayor Daniel Lurie’s aggressive push since taking office in January 2025—attempting to deploy police sweeps, expanding treatment beds, and securing millions in state funds—the city’s open-air drug markets persist, particularly in the Tenderloin and SoMa districts. Fentanyl dealers operate in broad daylight, with overdose deaths spiking 41% from 2020 to 2023, per the San Francisco Medical Examiner, and preliminary 2025 data showing slight decline. Property crime, retail theft and mentally ill individuals on the streets forced chains like Walgreens and Target to shutter stores. Tech workers, already remote-enabled, cite San Francisco’s safety as a top reason for leaving: a 2024 Bay Area Council survey found 62% of residents considering departure due to crime and homelessness.

Mayor Lurie’s efforts, while earnest, are undermined by prior decriminalization policies and a city budget bloated by fiscal irresponsibility—$15 billion for FY 2025–26, with a projected $1.1 billion deficit driven by pension obligations, union contracts, and unfunded homeless programs.

California’s tech decline—below 2008 levels, with 71,000+ jobs vaporized since 2022—points to a pivotal shift. Newsom’s petulant rhetoric clashes with on the ground realities, the state has tarnished its luster.