165M Jobs - Mapped One Dot at a Time
If you zoom in on Las Vegas on the 165M US Jobs by Sector map you probably won't be surprised to discover that huge numbers of people in the city work in the Accommodation and Food sector, servicing the millions of tourists who visit Las Vegas every year.
Kyle Walker's new interactive map, 165M US Jobs by Sector, visualizes the geographic distribution of jobs across the United States using a massive dot-density map. Every dot on the map represents jobs from one of twenty major employment sectors, from Agriculture and Manufacturing to Healthcare and Public Administration.
The map is built using vector tiles and MapLibre GL, allowing users to smoothly zoom from a national overview down to neighborhood-level patterns. As you zoom in, the map dynamically increases the level of detail, revealing how different industries cluster in different parts of the country. Manufacturing jobs form dense corridors around the Great Lakes, energy extraction dominates parts of Texas and the Mountain West, while Las Vegas glows with dense concentrations of Accommodation and Food sector jobs along the Strip.
One particularly nice touch is the live "jobs per dot" counter, which updates as you zoom. At the national scale a single dot can represent thousands of jobs, while at street level individual dots approach a one-job-to-one-dot resolution.
The project is also an impressive technical demonstration of what modern browser-based mapping can handle. Rather than loading 165 million points directly into the browser, the data has been preprocessed into vector tiles with progressive thinning at lower zoom levels. The result is a map that remains fluid and responsive despite its enormous scale.
The employment data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau's LODES v8 dataset (2023), which provides highly detailed workplace location data across the United States.
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