Poll: If you're in the US, What State Do You Live In?

[shawndumas]

Including D.C.

[matthuggins]

I wonder how much this chart will be skewed since it is almost 5pm on the east coast right now vs. late afternoon for the west coast.

[detst]

I suspect the answer is "significantly". It would have been better to post in the morning.

[scottclark]

well, at our shared tech space downtown Lexington, it was beer and bourbon night so... you lost like 5 Kentucky votes right there.

[jchung]

You posted this at the end of the day on the East Coast on Valentine's day? Skew results much?

[HeyImAlex]

http://hnpollthing.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

Edit: And now the script automatically renders into a template and deploys to s3 every 5 minutes.

Here's a script that produces the ratios between number of votes and the population of each state. It's ugly but you know... whatever...

http://pastebin.com/pDU9iRnN

    Python 2.7
    argparse==1.2.1
    beautifulsoup4==4.1.3
    requests==1.1.0
    wsgiref==0.1.2

[noxryan]

Interesting, me and another programmer I work with just voted for North Dakota, yet it was only raised to 1 point.

I wonder if HN limits votes by IP Address.

[duck]

This is from 2.5 years of web traffic to my Hacker Newsletter project (http://hackernewsletter.com), which a very large portion comes from HN so I think it could be useful:

California 21.79%

New York 10.37%

Texas 6.74%

Massachusetts 5.07%

Florida 4.37%

Illinois 4.22%

Washington 3.82%

Georgia 3.19%

Pennsylvania 2.98%

Virginia 2.60%

North Carolina 2.26%

Ohio 2.15%

Michigan 2.11%

New Jersey 2.08%

Colorado 2.05%

Maryland 1.86%

Maine 1.78%

Oregon 1.63%

Minnesota 1.63%

Missouri 1.37%

DC 1.33%

Arizona 1.31%

Tennessee 1.24%

Connecticut 1.06%

Utah 1.06%

Indiana 1.05%

Wisconsin 0.87%

Alabama 0.85%

Kentucky 0.70%

South Carolina 0.61%

Oklahoma 0.57%

Iowa 0.52%

Kansas 0.49%

Louisiana 0.46%

New Hampshire 0.43%

Nevada 0.39%

Nebraska 0.36%

Alaska 0.32%

Hawaii 0.29%

New Mexico 0.29%

Idaho 0.28%

Rhode Island 0.27%

Arkansas 0.19%

North Dakota 0.18%

Vermont 0.17%

Mississippi 0.15%

West Virginia 0.11%

Delaware 0.11%

Montana 0.11%

Wyoming 0.07%

South Dakota 0.07%

[adolfojp]

You should include the territories for the sake of completeness. I know of a few Puerto Ricans, including myself, who frequent this website.

[snogglethorpe]

... and "not in U.S.", 'cause it's interesting to see what proportion of readers couldn't participate in the poll...

[ktavera]

Agreed, i'm in the US Virgin Islands.

[kordless]

I wish I was at your place working. It's been freezing here lately! (Moraga, CA)

[seldo]

What, no "Denial"?

[ninetax]

Questions for those few living in New Mexico: How is the job market for a SW engineer? Do you all pretty much live in ABQ, or is anyone is Santa Fe?

[fusiongyro]

Strangely, I've never been able to get a job in Albuquerque, but I have worked here in Socorro and in Española, of all places. I did contracting in Albuquerque and started my failed business there. You can certainly make a decent living at it, but if you're motivated largely by money, your friends in Chicago and the Bay will ruin your self-esteem. There are always openings around. Rural ones, too—we're looking for a group lead software engineer in my group at the NRAO right now.

Most of us are working for less than industry rates, some substantially less, depending on the location and the kind of work. People working at the labs and Boeing make probably the best money but put up with the most crap. There are a few medical/dental firms in Albuquerque, Xilinx and some other random stuff. I honestly have no idea what they're like. Aerospace. A lot of government contracting, a lot of Manpower-type contracting too. The right skills seem never to go out of fashion—Windows, Oracle, .NET. It's funny, because the southwest used to be kind of a big unix shop.

With specialized skills, you could be "the guy" in Albuquerque without being terribly special—Rails, Node.js, etc. Last time I went to a Barcamp up there about 12 people showed up and most of them were essentially designers.

If you want to work as a software engineer in Santa Fe, I'm sure you can find a position there, but you may need to be resourceful to find it. State government is there, for instance. They outsource nearly everything but I'm sure they have a few developers in a basement somewhere. There's the eponymous Santa Fe Institute. There are colleges, most in the spectrum past non-technical and into unreality, but a surprising number of kids show up at NMT from Santa Fe with a strong background in CS. They have to be getting it somewhere there. I'd imagine there's small businesses. Santa Fe has one of the higher costs of living in the state, so maybe the pay is closer to industry standards, but it's just a wild guess. There are resorts up there with expansive web presences that need to be maintained. The casinos always have strange openings too, but they tend to be recycled frequently due to political upheavals.

It's a good question. It's a pretty rarefied market. If you want to be here, I'm sure you can make it work, but if you're in it for wealth do a stint in the Bay and bring it back with you. :)

[RK]

My impression from talking to people in the area is that the investor money is in Santa Fe, but most of the programming jobs are in Albuquerque. Of course Albuquerque is about 10X the size of Santa Fe.

[nealabq]

I'm in Las Cruces, 3 hours south of Albuquerque (where I used to live, hence my name). Not too many SW jobs down here, but the few there are are very good.

[Xcelerate]

Anyone in Knoxville? :)

I knew California would be pretty high up there because of SV but I didn't realize so many people on here live there. For people who are in CA, do you live there because that's where most of the tech start-ups are or because it's a nice place (or both)?

[xb95]

I'm a country boy who grew up in the midwest and came here when a company I worked for in Portland got acquired. I've been stuck here for 8 long years, now, and constantly dream about going somewhere else.

California is fine, the SV is okay, there are certainly jobs and lots of opportunity and at this point I've built quite the network ... but seriously, I miss being able to go outside and see a field of corn from time to time.

One day...

[zellyn]

Came out to San Francisco for an interview, and my wife and I both loved it. A year later, I got another interview out here, landed the job, and we decided to move. We tell people it was 50/50: half for the job, half for the adventure.

We miss our friends in Atlanta, but San Francisco and the surrounding area are stunningly beautiful.

[macey]

This should probably always skew towards CA because of SV, but don't forget that the population of CA is the highest in the US by ~30% to begin with. I imagine there are a ton of people living here who were also born and raised here (myself included)

[joeyh]

I'm 1.5 hours from Knoxville in the most rural possible direction.

(Lived in the Bay Area in the past, still like to visit.)

[mikec3k]

I moved here because I'm in love with San Francisco (and really hated Florida, where I lived before), plus I work in the tech industry. I'd still want to live here even if I wasn't involved in tech.

[greghinch]

I was born here. So were my parents. I've been all over the world, I don't think I'd rather live anywhere else. Life is just great here

[jonvictorino]

I was raised in California and I just happened to enjoy building websites as a kid so it was a no brainer to move to Silicon Valley when I became an adult.

I just wish it wasn't so damn expensive to live here. States like Colorado and Arizona have been on my mind a lot lately since you can get a beautiful house out there for what it costs to buy a condo here.

[Retric]

It's 5:20pm on the east coast so the numbers are going to be way off.

Edit: This was posted at 4:20pm EST and normally I don't check HN much after 4, I am just waiting on something before I call it a day.

[borlak]

I just moved to CA from OK last year. I moved for a few reasons. 1) family -- more stuff to do here (understatement) 2) I don't fit in with OK culture (red + religious) 3) career -- I'm a programmer

[donretag]

I live in Califonia, but since I do not live in SV (or anywhere with a noticeable tech scene), my answer must be because it is a nice place.

Anyone hiring in Santa Barbara? SB is my eventual goal.

[dubya]

Funny to find Knoxvillains here. I've looked once or twice for Coursera meet-ups and concluded that K-town was a bit of a tech desert. (Curiously, several pagan/witch meetups are available.)

[bonyt]

Sometimes I feel like these polls just produce a population heatmap, like in https://xkcd.com/1138/

[digikata]

It would be personally interesting if the Californa votes could be split into northern California (and presumeably SV), and Southern Cal.

[xmrsilentx]

Three hackers in Alaska so far. That's a hacker density of one hacker per 195,470.66667 square miles.

[tnash]

Anybody else in Columbus, OH? This place is the best.

[krauses]

It took some courage, but I'm willing to admit I'm in Columbus Ohio.

[cdvonstinkpot]

Related Columbus, OH post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196980

[barake]

I work remotely from Louisville and visit Columbus every other week or so. Email is in my profile if anyone wants to meetup.

[greg5green]

And voted as such.

[Crake]

I live here. It's the best place in Ohio, for sure.

[nathanwdavis]

It would be interesting to see the results of this weighted by state population.

[e1ven]

Of course, PG/RTM could generate a fairly accurate heatmap by running analysis on the webserver logs. I'd be curious to see the "official" results, if they were willing to release them.

[xmattus]

Internet content that's meant for affluent, educated professionals will always skew heavily towards California and New York generally (including HN, but I work with a lot of media organizations and their Google Analytics profiles bear this out).

The surprise here is Washington and Massachusetts overtaking Illinois, which would seem to suggest that the large tech community in Seattle and Boston makes up for the much smaller population of those metro areas than the population of Chicago.

[drcube]

I'm in Illinois, but the St. Louis area, not Chicagoland.

[spelunker]

Kansas City right here. Midwest awwww yeah!

[jvm]

Washington State actually seems the most disproportionately represented (relative to population)

[olefoo]

Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon; all have or had their headquarters near Seattle.

Puget sound metro is just as big and bad as Silicon Valley. It's also subject to more indoor weather, which is why engineers who live there are more productive...

[w1ntermute]

It was the same on Reddit.

[Felix21]

soo 1. California 2. New York and 3. Texas

hardly surprising

[te_platt]

So here are the results so far scaled to population. I took the poll result, divided by population, multiplied by 1,000,000.

Edit: formatting

34.79234505 22  District of Columbia 632,323

12.46916781 86  Washington 6,897,012

10.53242301 70  Massachusetts 6,646,144

9.463366651 360  California 38,041,430

9.105914747 26  Utah 2,855,287

8.719395243 34  Oregon 3,899,353

7.987080099 5  Vermont 626,011

7.903489526 41  Colorado 5,187,582

6.949319685 136  New York 19,570,261

6.814475157 9  New Hampshire 1,320,718

5.468597264 4  Alaska 731,449

4.833487292 26  Minnesota 5,379,139

4.760580867 5  Rhode Island 1,050,292

4.504765148 58  Illinois 12,875,255

4.361612575 4  Delaware 917,092

4.287993048 3  North Dakota 699,628

4.12008994 27  Arizona 6,553,255

3.76168379 5  Maine 1,329,192

3.645545107 95  Texas 26,059,203

3.390829366 10  Arkansas 2,949,131

3.342295327 12  Connecticut 3,590,347

3.298367784 27  Virginia 8,185,867

3.233586182 6  Nebraska 1,855,525

3.225824337 32  Georgia 9,919,945

3.143337225 18  Wisconsin 5,726,398

3.133366087 5  Idaho 1,595,728

3.076269015 30  North Carolina 9,752,073

2.984655884 3  Montana 1,005,141

2.963763963 14  South Carolina 4,723,723

2.933017771 26  New Jersey 8,864,590

2.883491226 11  Oklahoma 3,814,820

2.872917225 4  Hawaii 1,392,313

2.822988023 17  Missouri 6,021,988

2.787999151 18  Tennessee 6,456,243

2.585490416 33  Pennsylvania 12,763,536

2.549042299 15  Maryland 5,884,563

2.537214595 7  Nevada 2,758,931

2.529504136 25  Michigan 9,883,360

2.42558227 7  Kansas 2,885,905

2.155854249 4  West Virginia 1,855,413

1.99233816 23  Ohio 11,544,225

1.917970327 4  New Mexico 2,085,538

1.760055924 34  Florida 19,317,568

1.734870197 1  Wyoming 576,412

1.659054716 8  Alabama 4,822,023

1.626446806 5  Iowa 3,074,186

1.529675553 10  Indiana 6,537,334

1.199970241 1  South Dakota 833,354

1.141444361 5  Kentucky 4,380,415

1.005050041 3  Mississippi 2,984,926

0.86920752 4  Louisiana 4,601,893

[stevoski]

One person from South Dakota responded, and you've used that to determine a score to 9 decimal places?

You really need to only show scores with at least a certain number of respondents. You should also round to the nearest integer.

[seanmcdirmid]

I really think this table would look better if you just did 3 significant digits.