Silicon Alley—the hub of New York City’s burgeoning high technology industry—has begun to boom. According to a recent report commissioned by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York’s tech and information sector employed 262,000 workers in 2013 and paid out wages totaling more than $30 billion.1 That reflects an increase between 2007 and 2012 in the amount of wages in the sector of $5.8 billion, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Research. All told, this industry is the city’s second largest contributor to private wages—trailing behind only the financial services industry. After years of growth following the burst of the dotcom bubble in 2001, Silicon Alley has come into its own, and now stands alongside Massachusetts’ Route 128, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and California’s Silicon Valley.
As a result of that growth spurt, and since the economic crisis of 2008, tech has become New York’s second largest job sector behind financial services. However, the city’s tech industry, now is its second phase of success and expansion, is once again at risk of losing its momentum and lagging behind other states because New York law allows employers to routinely impose onerous post-employment restrictive covenants2 on the activities of their employees.
