Michael Hiltzik: That big tech exodus out of California turns out to be a bust

Wannabe innovation hubs from coast to coast have been slavering over the prospect that the work-from-home revolution triggered by the COVID pandemic would finally break the stranglehold that California and Silicon Valley have had on high-tech jobs.

Here's the latest picture on this expectation: Not happening.

That's the conclusion of some new studies, most recently by Mark Muro and Yang You of the Brookings Institution.

They found that although the pandemic brought about some changes in the trend toward the concentration of tech jobs in a handful of metropolitan areas, the largest established hubs as a group "slightly increased their share" of national high-tech employment from 2019 through 2020. (Emphasis theirs.)

Stories of discontented California entrepreneurs decamping for up and coming new hubs or even remote (but broadband-enabled) climes are common fodder in the news.

The Times last year published a sort of diary in which Geoffrey Woo, one such expatriate, wrote about his relocation to Miami to flee the crime and pandemic lockdown of San Francisco. He's still in Miami.

Yet "the big tech superstar cities aren't going anywhere," Muro told me. "There's a suggestion