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by impendia 5152 days ago
Regarding the "recent developments", RTP jumps out on the following map:

http://www.wral.com/news/political/page/10991843/

Durham and Orange Counties voted no by over 2-1 margins. And meanwhile, Proposition 8 passed in California a few years back; indeed, such propositions have been passed everywhere in the US where they've been put to the voters as a whole. North Carolina is not distinguished in this respect.

I personally like San Francisco over RTP, despite originally being from Durham, but there is a lot that is very good about the RTP area, and I personally know a lot of very talented people who are extremely happy (if, admittedly, a little bit less so this week...) to call it home.

2 comments

Not to be nitpicky, but NC did distinguish itself from Proposition 8 in banning civil unions and domestic partnerships, too.

NC is a wonderful place, I was making the comment that now it's just a little harder to recruit great people there. Perception matters when scaling a company. Starting a 10 person team is probably fine. Scaling to a 100-200 team gets that much harder.

What on earth does this have to do with technical talent?

Projecting your political opinions a bit?

Some technical talent is directly impacted by these types of laws and we care. The last time I got an e-mail asking me about a position in Qatar I just sent back a link to this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Qatar along with a few polite words.

The guy was sympathetic, but we both knew that was the end of that conversation.

For some of us this isn't a matter of politics, but an impact on our quality of life. And for others of us, it may just be a matter of politics, but even then, that doesn't mean it's trivial.

In Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class", he describes an experiment, complete with empirical data, that show an overwhelming positive correlation between gay-friendliness and positive economic outlook.