Who’s in DMV tech, and where do they actually work?

From defense contractors to quantum pioneers to EV transition upstarts and so much in between, the DC area’s tech ecosystem is as varied as it is geographically diffuse.

With coworking spaces, office parks and universities spread throughout the region — not to mention the myriad of government agencies that hire technologists directly — understanding the “who” and “where” of DC tech proves much more difficult than pointing to commercial corridors in Reston or Columbia Heights and saying, “Here it is.”

As part of our ever-evolving effort to better understand the tech workforces across our markets, we at Technical.ly (or more accurately, our data-loving CEO Christopher Wink) recently dug into data from our Tech Economy Dashboard. This platform, the beta version of which debuted earlier this year, pulls proprietary data from labor analytics company Lightcast to offer stats-illustrated pictures of both technologists and people in related positions in select regions throughout the country. It’s already informed key reporting on our other core markets of Philadelphia, Delaware, Baltimore and Pittsburgh.

During this deep dive, Wink also pulled data from a variety of US Census sources. Here are some insights from those sources:

1. Black and Latinx tech workers are underrepresented.

A chart breaking down the DC MSA’s tech workforce by ethnicity. (Technical.ly/Christopher Wink)

For the DC metro area, the dashboard counts 271,291 tech industry jobs and 319,625 tech occupations — a distinction between jobs within the tech industry and any role the federal government designates as “Computer and Information Technology,” regardless of industry, respectively. Of all these tech workers in the DC-Arlington-Alexandra metropolitan statistical area, 18.7% are Black and 5.7% are non-white Hispanic. These numbers fall below these groups’ respective 24% and 17% of the region’s population.

The disparities are even sharper for software developers, who the dashboard said enjoyed a median salary of $134,063 in the DC area as of 2022 — one of the highest pay grades of any occupational category. Only 8.95% of software developers are Black, while 3.96% are Hispanic or Latino.

Similar to many other metro areas’ tech workforces, white and Asian workers are overrepresented compared to their presence in the region’s general population. White tech workers represent 52.4% of all tech workers, 45.24% of software devs and 42% of the overall population; Asian ones are 19.9% of all tech workers, 39.31% of software devs and 11% of the region.

2. District residents with reverse commutes largely stayed within immediate surrounding counties.

A graph showing commuting destinations for DC residents. (Technical.ly/Christopher Wink)

Crowded Metro stations are a common site on any given workday morning throughout DC’s suburbs. But whatever those commutes suggest, many district residents — tech workers and non-tech workers alike — do the opposite and head out to those suburbs, or even further afield.

According to Wink’s analysis of the American Community Survey’s five-year commuting flows from 2016 to 2020, nearly 83,000 DC residents were commuting to Virginia and Maryland. The largest shares went to Montgomery County, Maryland (22,586 residents) and Arlington County, Virginia (18,426). Other popular locations include Prince George’s County, Maryland (16,239) and Fairfax County, Virginia (14,514). The numbers seemed to dwindle the further away people got from the district, though not in any linear form: Baltimore, Maryland’s largest city, boasted 1,396 reverse commuters, while locales between the two cities like Anne Arundel County and Howard County had 1,090 and 927 DC commuters, respectively.

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Of course, a lot’s changed for tech scenes and city-based workforces around the country since the end of data collection in 2020. So we want to know if this information, particularly for district denizens, still reflects what you know about your workplaces.

Are far-flung commutes less common than what this data suggests? Let us know by emailing dc@technical.ly.com.