Move to Chattanooga, Hack & Get Paid

I find the particulars of this program offensive and insulting.

"Tag a geek", "geek hunt", "geek move". Geeks are circus performers that bite the heads off chickens. Obviously it doesn't mean talented engineers.

No relocation paid is a sad joke that no one competent would accept. But $1250 relocation expenses is just plain insulting. That won't even pay for gas and a U-Haul in most cases, never mind proper moving. Forgiving $10k of a mortgage but only if you stay 5 years and move to a neighborhood they specify? Absurd.

I'm sure they will attract plenty of naive college graduates that weren't able to get proper job offers in desirable locations.

I know about Chattanooga. It's very fundamentalist and people there are not very bright. It's not a desirable place for an engineer to live.

TN could probably be a reasonable startup hub with some work (like this). I don't know as much about Chattanooga vs. eastern TN in general.

No state income tax is kind of a draw -- not a huge factor for the startup employees themselves, but it would be a reasonable place for retired people with some income who could be investors, or for consultants or other people with high current incomes (who might work on startups on the side). I really don't understand why people who travel 80+% of the time don't base themselves in a low-tax state.

I happen to really like the environment, outdoor activities, gun laws, etc. in the state. It's not going to appeal to everyone, and especially not to a lot of startup people, but all they need to do is be really attractive to a specific niche. If 1% of startup people love it, it might be better than 10-20% of startup people just finding it ok. (Conversely, I'd never live in Chicago, but a lot of other people seem to like it).

FedEx having a hub in-state is great, although crime in Memphis is bad enough that I'd caution against living there. Maybe it depends a lot on the neighborhood. Chattanooga is pretty far away, though.

It's close enough to the East Coast to be a reasonable outsourcing/back office location. Proximity to Huntsville, AL is a huge plus -- great educated workforce, etc.

This is worse than the Austin group that thought they could hire SF devs with taco parties.

Chump change, and not nearly enough to cover moving expenses for an established and talented developer living in a major metropolitan area.

My coworker from Chattanooga assures me that nobody would want to live in those neighborhoods, and that he is sending the list to friends and family to laugh about.

As a Chattanooga resident and developer (I work for Rackspace), this has irritated me since I've heard of it.

I couldn't imagine someone doing a yuppie hunt or a gay hunt... Very embarrassing for our beautiful city for a few unqualified companies and people to represent us this way.

Apologies to all my fellow developers... Don't move here for a job or the internet, neither offerings are as great as advertised.

Hm, if you believe Bruce Sterling the place is due to become a hotbed of hacker and alternative culture: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2OpTnzs2PMC&q=chattano...

Someday.

For 10 people? Quite a gimmick.

The last 2 sound good.

Nice effort, I guess? But really this is just seems like a bad gimmick to me. As someone who lives nearby, Eastern TN as a whole strikes me as a horrible place for hackers or startups. The majority of local talent seems generally disinterested in moving to any languages or tools beyond those of the average enterprise (java, .net), or anything built/polished in the last 5 years. Generally your choices are making a decent salary working in healthcare with .NET/Java, or making <30k salaries with open source, which generally doesn't go much further than CMS modifications, or working for a CTO that thinks php frameworks are fadish and don't really work in most situations (so he rolled his own).

I don't think I need to add a disclaimer that this is non-objective and entirely related to my personal experiences in Chattanooga. It's bad enough that after job hunting in the area, I decided to go entirely freelance. And even there, I won't even talk to local companies. I've already wasted enough time hunting local clients only to realize nary a one of them expects to pay > $20/hr.

"moving to where you can get faster Internet service"... "GigCity"...

This is clearly bait. Pretending this gigabit internet service is available or practical for a startup, much less personal use, is either dishonest or ignorant of the actual situation in Chattanooga.