Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. You don't have to look too far to find a tech scene that's still booming,

but you might not have to cross the border. From American public media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

It's been kind of a tough six months for the tech industry in the US. Just last month,

Meta announced another round of 10,000 job cuts after 11,000 at the end of the year.

Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and dozens more companies that aren't household names

have all laid off workers and mass as the pandemic hiring spree ran into rising interest rates

and changing consumer behaviors. But just south of the border in Tijuana,

the IT industry is still heating up. It's a phenomenon sometimes called near-shoring,

like off-shoring where jobs move abroad, but not halfway around the world.

KPBS reporter Gustavo Soliz has more on the tech boom in Mexico.

In a high-rise office space in Tijuana's Chapultepec neighborhood,

dozens of programmers and coders sit at their desk. They like to joke around while they work.

These are some of the roughly 20,000 IT workers in Tijuana, and that number is expected to

triple within the next decade. It's a sign of Tijuana's booming tech sector. The labor shortage

north of the border is fueling growth down here. There is this extreme need for engineers in the US,

and right now they're not meeting that demand.

Ves Omar Barra, an engineering director with a company called I-Tijuana,

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