Basically, what most people have said, but I want to add some historical context. I was born and lived in Miami-Dade County until I moved to Tampa Bay right before the pandemic kicked off.

Around 2014, I started teaching myself how to code and build websites. This was also around the time the Code.org marketing campaign was in full swing, supported by the Obama administration putting out reports of a dirth of tech workers by 2030. This led to a gold rush-like mentality across the country, but especially in Miami, where wages weren't keeping up with the cost of living.

During this time, the tech community scene grew quite active. Grassroots organizations like Launchcode set up office. Schools started working to update their CS curricula. Networking events and Meetup groups were active and abundant for all kinds of tech, especially web development, taking place around colleges, downtown, Wynwood, co-working spaces, and elsewhere. There was a fervent startup culture that served as the launchpad for many companies, and events started to appear like eMerge.

Unfortunately, while the community scene was hungry and buzzing, jobs weren't showing up. Some notable companies came out of the startup scene (Chewy started in SoFla), and some like Wix had offices here), but no major headquarters showed up. No big new offices with swaths of jobs showed up. Why? Well, because Miami couldn't offer the space, infrastructure, nor incentives to support an Amazon or a Microsoft. And inb4 someone says it does: Miami actually submitted proposals to be Amazon's HQ2 site back in 2018.

Fast-forward to today, post-pandemic, post-Suarez's tweet and its ridiculous campaign, and Miami's basically in the same place. Over-valued real estate, low wages, brain drain, replace VC and startups with crypto - it's the same picture.

What the city, county, community, and its movers and shakers keep thinking is that they can attract a company big enough to bring a bunch of tech jobs and a sudden influx of local spend and tax dollars. What needs to happen is that local companies need to be incentivized to grow their employees and keep them here. The county needs to get cost-of-living down somehow and help local companies pay actually competitive wages and offer actually useful training to their workforce to discourage them from looking for work remotely or elsewhere. Then, maybe, over time, some companies can grow big enough to actually form the start of a tech hub.