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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Charlotte, NC now. This city is not on the radar of most tech folks, and it's way under-rated. Everyone thinks there's no culture here, it's just chain restaurants and hicks. Granted, it's changed a lot in the past 2-3 years, so people still haven't realized it's actually a rad city and very affordable.

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I actually like chain restaurants and hicks (dead serious - I have a tractor, 11 acres, horses, a goat, some cats, and a couple of guns to keep it all safe), so that'd be a selling point for me. I live in Grand Rapids, MI, and I'm afraid that our chain restaurant and redneck culture is being destroyed by an influx of people over the past few years. Hope the same doesn't happen to Charlotte. Downside is that here in GR tech jobs are kind of scarce, which is true of a lot of places that still have somewhat rural communities within commuting distance.

EDIT - 'To keep it all safe' ... really means safe from wild animals. If you keep a hobby farm, you know where I'm coming from :).

I don't have a hobby farm and I'm not in the US. What wild animals are a threat in that situation? Bears? Or do you also mean as a threat to gardens - deer, etc?

Foxes and coyotes for the goat (which has been de-horned), raccoons for the cats. So far just scaring them has worked.

Thanks. We don't really have a raccoon-equivalent in Australia. Possums are annoying (noisy, steal fruit, get in the roof, etc) but not dangerous. Dingoes generally don't make it into populated areas and foxes mostly traumatise chickens who typically have well-protected coops.

> This city is not on the radar of most tech folks, and it's way under-rated

On the contrary I don't believe its under-rated at all. It gets just the kind of people that like the lifestyle it offers.

Any advice for finding a job in that area? The HN "who's hiring" page doesn't have too much in NC, and other job sites seem to show mostly finance and consulting companies.

Depends on what you're looking for. Charlotte is 90% finance-related jobs (I used to work there myself). I live in the Raleigh/Durham area, and it has a decent amount of engineering opportunities, especially in biotech.

It's not the Bay Area, but it's pretty comfortable.

The tech startup scene is small, but very friendly and open. There's a few incubators. Check out meetup.com, it's pretty tech/startup heavy in Charlotte, see if there's something that catches your eye.

IBM has a big presence there; most of IBM cloud engineering team is based out of RTP. Most of the companies will be branches of major corporations.

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