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Last year, Twitter signed a lease to move from its old headquarters in the South of Market, seen here in 2009, to a new space in the Mid-Market district.

It's home to the University of California, Berkeley, a world-class university that churns out computer scientists and electrical engineers; it offers plentiful vacant office space and is easily accessible by both freeway and public transportation.

And yet, new numbers released Friday by the state Employment Development Department show that the high-tech hiring boom that's powering an economic recovery in San Francisco and the South Bay is bypassing Alameda and Contra Contra counties.

"There's a brain drain running from the East Bay to San Francisco and the South Bay," said Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information. 

Wadhwa said the famously liberal city of Berkeley has created an atmosphere so toxic to business that graduates move away after finishing school. The area's "economic survival is at stake," he said.

The new employment numbers show that while the tech sector added 8,700 jobs in the South Bay over the past year and 6,400 in the San Francisco metro area (which also includes Marin and San Mateo counties), the number of tech workers in the East Bay declined by 600.

Long-term jobs numbers in the Bay Area are even more striking. Over the past seven years, the East Bay has lost 11,100 tech jobs, the data show. During the same time, the South Bay added 23,100 jobs in tech and the San Francisco metro area added 13,000.

"Jobs cluster," said Russell Hancock, head of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a business-backed think tank.

One cluster, Hancock said, is around "prestige addresses — Palo Alto, Mountain View and Santa Clara," which draw companies because of their geographic proximity to venture capitalists.

San Francisco has offered generous tax breaks to tech companies like Twitter that locate in the mid-Market area and is also attractive to tech firms "because the people doing this are young, hip big-city dwellers, and San Francisco is a thrilling city," Hancock said. "Oakland, not so much."

Oakland officials dispute that characterization, pointing to a handful of companies that have decided to stick it out in the East Bay — including the online music site Pandora and LightScribe, the optical disc recording firm.

"The story for Oakland is a good one," Sue Piper, the spokeswoman for Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said in an interview, noting that Pandora had added 200 jobs in the last year. "It's on the uptick. We're making gains."

In an emailed answer to questions, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy said Oakland was becoming a more desirable place to run a business. 

"The local community and government are incredibly supportive, and more and more restaurants, wine bars, art studios, etc. are opening every month, adding to Oakland’s lively and diverse list of things to do," he said. 

But the EDD figures show Pandora to be a bit of an anomaly, with techology hiring occuring almost exclusively in San Francisco and the South Bay.

In the San Francisco area there are currentlly 9,222 help-wanted ads for computer engineers, web developers and computer system analysts, the state said. In the South Bay, the number is 7,675.

In the East Bay, that figure is just 2,572.

Based on guidance from two labor market experts, The Bay Citizen calculated the number of technology jobs by combining figures from three employment categories: computer and electronic product manufacturing, computer systems design, and information.

Correction: Due to a calculation error, a previous version of this article overstated the number of technology jobs added in the South Bay over the past year and over the past seven years.