

Ask HN: Tech scene in Raleigh, NC? - gs7

I&#x27;m contemplating leaving the bay area in about a year for reasons deserving its own post. I keep reading about a tech scene in Raleigh, but I&#x27;m curious to hear from HNers who live there about what Raleigh is really like. Do you enjoy living there? How are the people? Is it hard to find a tech job that pays a decent salary? Is there much of a startup scene? How&#x27;s the weather? How&#x27;s the food? Is the cost of living reasonable?<p>If it helps, I&#x27;m a full stack web dev with some iOS experience and technical project management skills (see my profile for more info).<p>I appreciate your insights!
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cblock811
Upvoting as I'm from Charlotte, NC and want to hear how our neighbor Raleigh
is doing! From my time visiting there and from what my friends who live there
say:

It was a great, relaxed place to live. There are lots of smart people (it's in
the Research Triangle). Weather is truely seasonal. Hot in the summer
(80-100+), cool autumn and spring, cold winter. Not cold enough to have the
snow stick regularly, but it will melt in the day and freeze at night. So
beware black ice.

I'm also in the Bay Area. Would love to hear why you're leaving over coffee if
you're open to it. Maybe I can intro you to some good people if you end up
moving over there too. Email is in my profile.

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slosh
Raleigh is great. Lots of educated people. Two hours to the beach. Good jobs.
Cheap labor.

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tom_b
Hi. The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is a tech hub and has been for years,
with a number of big IT companies in Research Triangle Park (RTP). RTP is kind
of the center between those three cities.

RTP historically has a bunch of big IT in it - IBM, SAS, and Nortel were the
big three, but Nortel melted away, not sure what IBM is doing on the hiring
front there, SAS is still chugging along. Currently, I think Fidelity,
Deutsche Bank, and MetLife are out in RTP. Fidelity seems to be recruiting
this year consistently and the other two as well. These big places all pay
pretty normal salary ranges. I'm out of the corporate dev world, but anecdotal
info would seem to peg salaries in the $90K to $110K at those places for
experienced engineers. Friends and I have heard of $125K salaries plus bonus,
but none of us can actually point to a verified example of that base salary as
a direct hire. I think even these big enterprise corps want to hire a little
lower level and promote up. For contracting at the financial corps, all bets
are off. In 2008, I knew contractors in test groups doing $100-$150 an hour,
which was insane given the skill sets I observed on some of those contractors
(minimal). I wouldn't count on that today. I tend to put the Triangle
(shorthand for Raleigh, Durham, CH, and RTP) into a "third tier" of tech
cities, with SFB/NYC tier 1 and Chicago/Austin as tier 2.

I spend more time kind of looking at Durham for startups and small consulting
firms. Adzerk, iContact, and back out in RTP, MaxPoint are startups at various
points of existence. I have no idea what pay is like at startups. You might
want to check out [http://bigtop.it/jobs](http://bigtop.it/jobs) \- they have
both a job listing and host semi-regular mixer/job fair events. I went to one
and didn't really pursue anything. It may have been a little entry-level
leaning.

Oh, don't forget the local university tech scene. NC State is there in Raleigh
(and RedHat is on Centennial Campus), Duke is Durham, and UNC-CH in Chapel
Hill. If you are interested in being a staff coder in academia, there are
opportunities in those places. Duke and UNC-CH also have big hospital orgs
that hire buckets of IT staff - if you can shoehorn the word EPIC onto your
resume, you can land something in one of those two quickly.

Weather is lovely, but hotter than the Bay area. Humidity and 99F is . . .
nasty. And I'm a native NC'er. Good mix of sun and seasons during the year.
Excellent beaches (and the Outer Banks) two to four hours driving. Same drive
time West puts you at 4000 to 5000ft in the Appalachian mountains of NC.

Cost of living is ok. Housing cost varies too much to generalize. Cheaper,
sometimes much, outside the cities. Good food given the college town status in
all three. Reasonably active tech meetup scene.

If I was moving to the area and didn't have a partner or family, I would
probably lean towards downtown Durham. I feel like it might be a little more
funky and interesting than the other places. If I had a family or partner who
wanted to start one soon, I might shop around for a school district I would be
happy with and try to land there.

Oh, last thing - the Triangle has good political diversity, but I think once
you leave it, the state is generally conservative with pockets with more
progressive presence.

~~~
thecrumb
FYI - Red Hat is now located in downtown Raleigh.

