SAN JOSE — The Bay Area’s technology boom is so robust that it has reached record highs and has soared beyond the lofty pinnacles of the dot-com era nearly two decades ago, state labor statistics show.
At the end of April, the Bay Area boasted 831,700 technology jobs — 113,000 more than the dot-com peak of 718,700, which was achieved in December 2000, according to research by this news organization that was based on statistics culled from state Employment Development Department data.
That latest tech industry totals in the nine-county region as of April mark a 15.7 percent increase in the number of technology jobs compared to the dot-com heights. Over the same period of nearly 19 years since December 2000, the overall Bay Area job market has posted a 12.8 percent increase.
The trends over the 19 years show that the technology sector is clearly one of the engines of the Bay Area economy.
Yet an analysis of the EDD reports shows that the tech sector is the classic definition of a boom-and-bust industry.
During 2001, the year of the dot-com bust, when Internet startups and numerous other tech companies cratered, tech industry job totals in the Bay Area shrank by 14.9 percent, while all jobs in the Bay Area declined 6.1 percent.
From the height of the dot-com bubble at the end of 2000 to the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, the technology industry in the Bay Area melted down and lost 26 percent — a jaw-dropping one-fourth — of its jobs. During those same nine years, the overall Bay Area job market shrank by 12.9 percent.
Yet in the years of economic expansion, from the recession trough in 2009 through April 2019, the Bay Area’s tech industry has grown far more rapidly than the overall Bay Area employment sector.
During that nine-year stretch, the tech industry job market has increased by a stunning 56 percent, while all Bay Area jobs have surged by a sturdy 29.5 percent.
During the years since the dot-com peaks, the Bay Area has become only slightly more reliant on the tech industry, the EDD figures show.
In April, technology jobs accounted for just under 21 percent of all the jobs in the Bay Area. That compared with the nearly 20 percent share that tech employment commanded at the end of 2000.
Yet this time around, although economic downturns are inevitable and part of the business cycle, the tech industry seems better suited to being a steady — and vital — pillar of the Bay Area’s economic structure.
Vanished are evanescent names such as Webvan, Pets.com, and Boo.com, reminders of the “irrational exuberance” of the Internet bubble.
In their places are stalwarts such as Google, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Adobe. Plus, companies such as Amazon, eBay, Intel, Cisco, Applied Materials, and Lam Research figured out not only how to survive the dot-com meltdown, but in some cases, to become dominant players.