[garysweaver]

I think Raleigh is the best bang for the buck for tech, food, drink, and residence anywhere in the U.S.

Downtown Raleigh has art festivals, music festivals (Hopscotch, Wide Open Bluegrass), Red Hat amphitheater, and Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts (including Meymandi Concert Hall, Fletcher Opera Theater, Kennedy Theater, Memorial Auditorium), etc. There are a lot of great restaurants within walking distance of some nice/fun bars. You don't even have to walk or ride; they have a Trolley you can ride for free (or rent!), a Trolley Pub (bike bar), rickshaws, etc. There are clubs (various kinds and each age groups), but that's not as much my scene anymore. They are to a saturation point with microbrewing companies in the area, they have so many: http://www.ncbeer.org/brewery-map/ And that's not all of Raleigh, e.g. North Hills has been having great free outdoor concerts with a few great bars (and a great grocery store if you want to be cheap) right next to it, which has been our fav recently. It is basically everything you love about a "small town" (great people, community, lower cost of living) in a well-educated and resourced area (NCSU, UNC-CH, Duke Univ. and too many tech companies to mention) with plenty of great places to eat and things to do.

But, Durham has DPAC, lots of great restaurants, a good startup scene, including areas devoted to startups like the Underground in the American Tobacco District next to DPAC and the Durham Bulls ballpark (where they do concerts, too.), etc.

And for the best hole-in-the-wall places to eat, you just have to ask around enough, like anywhere else. It might be a hot pot Chinese place in some random Morrisville strip mall, etc.

[malandrew]

Used to live there. Now live in SF. Could never live in Raleigh again and I only go to visit family. It's entirely too car focused and the tech community is trivial in size compared to SF. The only active meetup group I came across while visiting recently with solid engineers was the Ruby Brigade. However with Relevance in Durham, I imagine there is a solid Clojure community in the area as well.

If you don't mind cars, the quality of live if pretty great, however it kills me that it is just far enough from the mountains and the beaches for either to be convenient. Freshwater lakes aren't too far, but too much of those nearby are in the watershed supplying water to the area so recreational usage is highly restricted.

[eitally]

It just depends what you're looking for and what you mean when you say "tech commnunity". Most of the big guys have either a major presence or a remote office here, and even more have work-from-homers. Even with Ericsson gone, IBM dwindling and Nortel out of business (but Ciena & Genband are doing great and picked up quite a bit of Nortel real estate in RTP), they've been replaced by Cisco, eXtreme Networks, NetApp, EMC, RedHat, SAS, etc. Heroku, Google, Salesforce, Zend, and a whole bunch more have smaller presences and you regularly run into people working either for startups or smaller tech companies as remote staff. Yes, it's indisputable that the culture is 180 degrees from SV, but if you're past the post-uni honeymoon period and are raising a family, I think most would be hard pressed to quantify SV as preferable to RTP using most measures. Public schools are far better (and there are very good private schools for the so-inclined), everyone is more relaxed, we have four seasons, real estate is affordable (my very nice 4300sqft house in a neighborhood of similar homes was under $500k), and the populace is very well educated (Chapel Hill supposedly has the highest PhD population per capita in the country). It's just that the people living here generally are here because their priorities are different than technology professionals in LA/SF/SV/NY.

And besides all the actual tech companies, there are great tech opportunities in banking if you go to Charlotte, in biotech (all the big pharmas and a lot of the smaller/startups are in and around RTP), and pure science. Just like the Bay Area has Stanford & Berkeley, we have Duke, UNC, and NCSU -- similarly high quality educations, just with a different focus.

In any case, I'm not trying to convince anyone you're wrong, but there are multiple angles to every story and RTP is definitely a good option for a lot of people. Two of my best friends in my neighborhood are relos from California (one from the LA area and one who worked for Heroku in SF), actually.