Home to Apple, Facebook, and Google, Silicon Valley is considered by many to be the center of the tech world. And while people travel from all over both to work for and visit the companies that shape our digital lives, it turns out that most tech workers don't actually consider working in the Valley all that important. So concludes a new poll from job site Indeed which found that almost 70 percent of tech workers surveyed said that having a job actually located in Silicon Valley is "not important." Also, 88 percent say they plan to leave their jobs within a year, with many in the Bay Area saying they're looking elsewhere something we've heard a couple times recently via polls.
The jobs site Indeed's paid, premium product surveyed "high-demand tech professionals," a group defined by the Business Times as "developers, technical specialists or analysts," confirmed what seems to make intuitive sense — showing up to a specific office park every day isn't viewed as all that crucial when you can just work remotely from a laptop.
According to the survey, 46.1 percent of tech workers aged 18 to 65 rated the importance of working in Silicon Valley as "not at all important," while another 22.2 percent rated it as "not that important." Younger workers, who likely don't have families or mortgages, tended to say it was important to be in the industry center early in their career, with 45 percent saying so.
These feelings appear to contrast with the belief of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who reportedly just recently spoke of the importance of having his employees clustered together at the Menlo Park Facebook HQ. If the results of the Indeed survey are to be believed, a majority of his own employees might not agree with him.
Zuckerberg probably shouldn't worry about those findings too much, however, as the same survey observed that tech workers still think the larger Silicon Valley/Bay Area region is where the jobs — important or not — are located.
Related: Facebook Employees Actually Hate Commuting, Beg For SF Office
