Agreed. State government in Texas is constantly overturning city ordinances in Austin: the whole bathroom bill BS, requiring local police to hold suspects for ICE, even overturning the plastic bag ban.

All of the current political ads are pretty nauseating. Regardless of where you stand on the issue of managing immigration (and IMO there are lots of fair points on both sides that I think unfortunately get drowned out by extremists), the tone of the current set of ads is clearly "Evil brown gang members are coming to sell your kids drugs and murder your family." Makes Willy Horton look quaint.

Having lived in Alabama, this would be rather offensive if it weren’t so endearing; Sounds like a child who’s so certain that the closet hides a monster, that they’re too scared to go learn that the noise is just an air vent.

I’ve known many a gay man who has left the south because they don’t feel safe there. Certainly voting wise, the parents comment feels very true.

I've known gay men who moved to the south because they liked the culture, so where are we now?

At perfect equilibrium for gay men in the south, with a pseudo-osmotic filter allowing only hardy gay men. Meanwhile the wimpy gay men who fled are invading the rest of the country, leaving behind a trail of well-kept neighborhoods with lots of tasteful little galleries.

Having lived in Georgia and Tennessee and still having family in the Carolinas, you're either a straight white man or living in denial.

I lived in Atlanta for the better part of a decade as a brown guy right after 9/11. Was great.

30 miles outside Atlanta things were not so rosy for brown people right after 9/11 when I lived there. And now, 17 years after 9/11, Georgia is doing everything it possibly can to suppress and purge voters who might shift the state away from staunch conservatism [1]. Please don't pretend there aren't massive issues in the south preventing it from being appealing to west coasters.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/us/politics/georgia-gover...

I guess you never spent much time in the hills just an hour or so from Atlanta in almost any direction, in any of a good number of towns where “a brown guy” would have a hard time finding a restaurant willing to take his money for food.

One of my college buddies lived in Douglas, three hours south of Atlanta in south georgia. Never had anyone be anything short of incredibly polite and hospitable. Heck, I’ve been in rural Illinois, rural VA, and rural GA quite a bit and everyone’s been great. I don’t know (or much care) about peoples’ politics but I’ve always been treated respectfully.

Another brown guy checking in. My aunt and uncle practiced medicine in Murphy, NC for many years and only ever had a problem when the feds thought Eric Rudolph might be hiding in their backyard.

You’re so unwilling to stand behind your statement that you created a sock puppet account to say it for you.

Having lived in Alabama as a Catholic yankee I was met with at best extreme ignorance about my then beliefs and at worst outright harassment and discrimination for having the wrong accent and wrong Christian denomination. Within the first week of moving there, we had a Klan rally in town.

Most of the other local Catholic families, if they could afford it, moved their children to private school to escape.

The schools had corporal punishment, and demanded that we call our teachers sir or ma'am, a custom that I was not used to and have encountered nowhere else. Failing to do so landed me in detention within the first month or so.

I was there for the original Roy Moore saga.

This was 15+ years ago and in a rural community with dirt roads, so I'm sure things have changed a bit and do not apply to the whole state, but checking the school website corporal punishment is still alive and well and Alabama nearly elected Roy Moore yet again.

I would never live there so long as the current toxic blend of religion and politics dominates the Southern political scene.

With the rampant sexism in west coast tech companies, you'd think they'd feel right at home in the southern states then.

North Carolina?

1. It's a control state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...

2. The politics are still overtly racist: https://twitter.com/haroldpollack/status/1051657219899617280

3. The HB2 saga demonstrates how strong the Christian right is in the state. As does a candidate in a race too close to call insisting there will never be peace in Jerusalem until Jews acknowledge the divinity of Christ: https://forward.com/fast-forward/413488/gop-candidate-no-pea...

4. gun laws are relatively permissive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_North_Carolina

5. MJ legalization is behind west coast states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_North_Carolina

So for some context I’m a black male, early 20s who just moved to NC from CT.

I’ll address 1,4, and 5 out of order and point out I don’t see their relevance to moving.

If NC had particularly egregious holes in its gun laws or something, I’d understand 4, but it doesn’t. It just doesn’t have notably strong gun laws, which puts it in the majority of states.

The other two are pretty inconsequential if you’re talking about the average person considering upending their entire existence to move somewhere, not a weekend romp

Now the other two...

That tweet was so egregious I had to look for context. It’s not a good context but it’s more of the gerrymandering conversations that have gone on around the country and it’s a technicality that they had to use that language.

Now if you think attempts to exclude blacks from politics is a southern problem, you must be out of touch with the rest of the US...

But of course it hurts to admit this is such a systemic issue that it’s not unsurprising to see a state grappling with it.

On the other hand, it’s also not going to fix itself by avoiding the many states it happens in.

I don’t believe in just sitting on my hands and waiting for change. I gladly moved to NC knowing of it’s troubled politics because they’ve been moving in the right direction.

It feels like what you’re saying is “NC is not SoCal” and in a way you’re implying “why would an average tech worker want to move to somewhere that isn’t a spitting image of California and SV culture?” (bringing up MJ legalization is a dead giveaway...)

The reality is places won’t change until people of other cultures join them.

My criteria for moving to NC wasn’t “will there be fewer religion nuts per square mile”, it was “is this a place where I can feel accepted without bending over backwards and changing who I am”.

And so far it has. I have gone on weekend trips to “the middle of nowhere” and wondered if I was getting looks because of the small black sports car in tractor-and-pickup-land, or because of the black person inside, but immediately felt ashamed when I entered a gas station or a store and had nothing but hospitality shown to me. (A friendly reminder, you can be woefully out of touch with Israel and Judaism, obsessed with religion [by our outsider standards] and still not be a fundamentally bad person)

Expecting other places to coddle your tastes and expectations to the point you’re complaining you have to buy certain types of liquor in a special store when bringing up blockers for people living somewhere... it doesn’t scream awareness of how the world at large works.

> It feels like what you’re saying is ... “why would an average tech worker want to move to somewhere that isn’t a spitting image of California and SV culture?” ... Expecting other places to coddle your tastes and expectations

I mean, this was the topic at hand. I recognize it hurts to hear one's chosen home disparaged, but when you're trying to recruit candidates into a location, you can't exactly demand they put up or shut up. You're not just competing with LA, you're also competing with SF, Portland, and Seattle, as well as Denver and other cities in Colorado. The 'blue bastion in a red state' pitch for specific cities basically relies on the supreme court to protect blue cities from their state governments, and well, we probably need to see a term or two of today's Supreme Court before we understand the full ramifications of recent appointments.

On the other hand, Amazon's HQ2 strategy seems to be 'let's find a lower CoL city to house all the accountants and HR specialists', so nationwide recruiting may not be an actual concern.

You’re not “disparaging my chosen home” (again strongly implying to me you have a pretty narrow experience with living in different places, once you’ve lived in varied enough places you embrace the fact nowhere is perfect)

If anything you’re whining that the US isn’t a white SV techie monoculture, and it’s music to my ears...

I don’t want NC to put for or put up with SV yuppies, I want NC to grow it’s own culture that is different than its current culture, but also different from what a coddled liberal wants apparently.

There’s a difference.

This thread wasn’t “where in the South can SV run it’s Xerox machine and make San Francisco 2”.

It’s where the would an average tech worker, who FYI is not a stereotypical FAANG employee, want to settle down.

There’s plenty appealing about NC, and plenty of other places that don’t fit your narrow minded, and frankly conceited view of how the world works.

> (again strongly implying to me you have a pretty narrow experience with living in different places, once you’ve lived in varied enough places you embrace the fact nowhere is perfect)

Heh, I actually did live briefly in NC as a child. And Texas, and Georgia, and Kansas, because my father was a contract software consultant. And I've spent my career in three different states. When I chat with my former colleagues from Kansas City about recruiting, there is always a tone of defensiveness about why none of my student employees consider their companies.

> If anything you’re whining that the US isn’t a white SV techie monoculture, and it’s music to my ears...It’s where the would an average tech worker, who FYI is not a stereotypical FAANG employee, want to settle down.

Eh, it's just the uphill battle you face in recruiting. And we haven't even really touched the subject of recruiting foreign nationals. I don't particularly care much about most of the items I posted, I just wanted to offer perspective to the 'we don't need to change to recruit, the recruits need to change' crowd seen here and elsewhere.

If you want my personal justification for not moving to NC or further south, it's pretty easy: Fire Ants.

You lived in all of these places but apparently it didn’t affect your development. Living in a place doesn’t need mean you let it change or affect you, I’ve lived in Ghana, Canada, various Western European countries and a few states, and the important part has always been being open to the culture of a place, not just being there (at a young enough age you don’t control that, but you don’t have to be that old to become more of a passive observer of your surrounding culture than an active participant)

I say that because you’re just doubling down on my point. Why do FAANG employees come into recruiting an average tech worker? In a sentence... “who needs them?”.

You seem to be in this, again, somewhat conceited, line of thought that the rest of the US combined does so little that the SV microcosm is the average of US tech and to change that you need to include the whole world (foreign nationals).

It screams this “oh what they do doesn’t count” or “you need that stereotypical FAANG guy” mentality that I see so much in trendy tech.

The average recruits don’t have to change to come to places like NC, or really places that aren’t don’t have Sillicon in their name (Sillicon Alley, Sillicon Mountsin, etc. included). All they need is an open mind.

Not the “Open to everyone in my hive mind, everyone else is not even worth communicating with” mind that I’ve seen grow strong in “trendy tech”

The recruits who think they’re being asked to change only think so because of closed minded thoughts almost all of the time.

They become so attached to this idea of an “open monoculture” that anything that isn’t their existing culture is an attack on it instead.

“How dare you try and make it change which monoculture I follow”.

NC would be a terrible place if it worked like SV because everyone would be the people who support the guy want Jews to accept Christ and repel anyone who felt differently and try and change you for not agreeing. That would be a close race, it’d be a won race.

And people who are in that “open monoculture” mindset immediately try and apply their lens to NC and see that.

At the end of the day people are coming to NC, and NC has accepted them. It’s not the place these people would project it as

(Replace NC with literally any “off the beaten path but somewhat up and coming locale that’s not a traditional ultraliberal playground)

Austin is a bigger deal than Denver or Portland, for tech.

Not sure if you've lived in NC... but there are a few things to that that I think you may have missed:

1. Yes, the fact that this is uniformly a control state, that is a problem. (Given how they are, I wish they had some special exclusion areas) However, a lot of the east coast operates in the same manner. The early hour for last call is bad as well.

2. Politics that you're talking about have very little to do with the tech sector. Despite what silicon valley would have you believe, you can be a conservative and be a productive member of the industry.

3. This sounds like you're pushing a political agenda here. I think a more succinct way to put this would be: Given the demographic that the tech industry attracts, the bible belt would not be favourable to their lifestyle.

4. (Also see #3)

There are reasons for doing tech in NC and it does have a small tech sector.

on #3, based on my 21 years in the south, i'd say non-white non-mail non-christian should seriously consider before moving there, especially if not in a million person city.

How much time have you spent in the south? You seem to know it quite well.

Another intolerant and narrow minded statement.

The North Carolina government is in the hands of the Republican party, with the exception of the governor's office, which is one of the weakest executive branches in the country and due to get weaker with some of the constitutional amendments on the ballot this year.

NC has some potential to improve its standing, but so far the gerrymandering has proven insurmountable as even when the courts rule the districts to be illegal, they allow them to continue to be used because the next election is always "too soon".

How is this tolerated as acceptable comment ? No way this would be tolerated if similar sentiment was said of SF but the South is fair game on HN. Everyone in the South particularly Texas is a bigot except the tech elite who are fleeing the high taxes and cost of living of California and other states for the abundant jobs in TX.