[crowbar]

I live in Knoxville and while I love living here, finding tech positions at decent pay is difficult. The cost of living is lower and many firms here take advantage of that to an insulting degree. I can imagine it being similar nearby in Chattanooga.

If I was planning to move to Chattanooga, the payout would nice small bonus, but that's about it.

[iamdave]

many firms here take advantage of that to an insulting degree

I found that to be the case throughout a lot of the Blue Ridge area, when I lived there. To a greater extent, unless you're heading to larger metropolis areas like Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Columbia or Charleston, what you've said is 100% true throughout much of the Southeast. Outside of larger cities, firms don't like to pay much.

It's why I hightailed it to Austin two years ago and haven't looked back except holiday visits to family.

[rwg]

It's even worse if you're in a small college town — you're competing against fresh grads who will work for pizza and Coke, as well as not-so-fresh grads who will take a huge pay cut just to return to party town.

http://www.roanoke.com/business/wb/314846

[steverb]

Awesome, another Knoxvillain on HN. I feared I was the only one.

Decent pay here in Knoxville isn't all that difficult, but you do have to hustle and build up a bit of a name for yourself before you can reasonably expect to pull in anything, and it won't approach SV rates. Oh, and you pretty much have to be a .NET developer, although there is some demand for Java and a tiny bit of demand building for Ruby and Python.

Feel free to drop me a line (email is in my profile) and maybe we can help each other out.

[Xcelerate]

Another HN'er in Knoxville here. I'm a grad student at UT. I really like the Knoxville area (more than Atlanta -- where I was) and am curious about what sort of technical jobs are in the area.

I'd kind of like to stay here and find a good engineering position, but I'm concerned that since the COL is so low (=> low starting salary when I graduate) that it may be better to get a job in a big city first and then move back here later.

[steverb]

On the dev side, there's a crap load of .NET work. I get two or three emails from local recruiters every week.

Unfortunately, half the jobs are at companies you will not want to work at for more than a year (ignore what anyone says about turn over rates, peoples expectations are too low).

My advice for anyone starting out would be to start attending the local user groups (http://www.etnug.org , http://knoxvillesc.org , http://www.agileknoxville.com ) and start working on public stuff that you can point to (put some stuff on git, answer some SO questions).

I have no clue what starting salary around here is currently though, but it should be easy to find out by asking one of the local recruiters. Shoot me an email if you need the names of some of the more trustworthy headhunters in the area.

[crowbar]

I keep meaning to go to some of the local user group meetings. Things keep getting in the way and I keep making excuses. Perhaps I'll do so this this month!

[steverb]

Of the three I would recommend the Software Craftsmanship Group. There's beer, and last year we did a intense scotch tasting.

Plus it's technology agnostic (although samples tend to be in .NET because Knoxville), it focuses less on technologies and more on technique.

[crowbar]

What steverb is pretty accurate here. I myself currently work in a .NET position. Most places around here, particularly healthcare companies, look for people familiar with .NET Framework. If you're doing web development, it's much the same, with a smattering of PHP (I've heard of a couple of Ruby positions available in the area, but there are very few.) It's a good opportunity to have consistent pay while you build an online presence/work on side projects if you're willing to go that route at the very least. Your mileage may vary, though.

[dubya]

One more Knoxvillian here. But I'm teaching part time at UT, not working in tech, so no clue on the job situation. ORNL definitely has some interesting tech jobs, but maybe not a ton of them.