10 Best U.S. Cities for IT Jobs with Tech Startups

Economists with salary data provider PayScale compiled a list of the 10 best cities in the U.S. for finding high-paying IT jobs with tech startups. They looked at the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S. and determined the number of startup IT jobs available per capita in each location. The company also investigated average salaries in each city. PayScale compared the jobs and salary data with national averages to develop its ranking of hotspots for tech startups.

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Salt Lake City has been dubbed “Silicon Slopes” for the tech community that has grown inside Utah’s capital and for the mountains that surround it. Notable tech companies based in Salt Lake City include Overstock.com and Software Technology Group. SaaS companies Omniture and AtTask are headquartered 40 miles south in Orem, and Ancestry.com is based in Provo. The median annual salary for IT workers with tech startups in Salt Lake City is $61,400. “Cash compensation is usually lower at startups than it is at bigger firms,” says PayScale’s Bardaro. She adds that it’s balanced out by equity in the company and other perks.

Budding entrepreneurs and technologists studying at Harvard and MIT have made Boston a hub for startup activity. Famous Boston-and Massachusetts-based startups include Monster.com, Brightcove, and Akamai Technologies. Today there’s a new pack of promising startups, which include peddl, MOVL and Tracelytics, among many others. An outgrowth of the MIT Media Lab, peddl aims to revolutionize the classified marketplace the way Craigslist did a decade ago. Social television company MOVL captured the attention—and VC dollars—of Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban. Tracelytics does application performance management. The median annual salary for IT workers with tech startups in Boston is $74,100.