Hi. The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is a tech hub and has been for years, with a number of big IT companies in Research Triangle Park (RTP). RTP is kind of the center between those three cities.

RTP historically has a bunch of big IT in it - IBM, SAS, and Nortel were the big three, but Nortel melted away, not sure what IBM is doing on the hiring front there, SAS is still chugging along. Currently, I think Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, and MetLife are out in RTP. Fidelity seems to be recruiting this year consistently and the other two as well. These big places all pay pretty normal salary ranges. I'm out of the corporate dev world, but anecdotal info would seem to peg salaries in the $90K to $110K at those places for experienced engineers. Friends and I have heard of $125K salaries plus bonus, but none of us can actually point to a verified example of that base salary as a direct hire. I think even these big enterprise corps want to hire a little lower level and promote up. For contracting at the financial corps, all bets are off. In 2008, I knew contractors in test groups doing $100-$150 an hour, which was insane given the skill sets I observed on some of those contractors (minimal). I wouldn't count on that today. I tend to put the Triangle (shorthand for Raleigh, Durham, CH, and RTP) into a "third tier" of tech cities, with SFB/NYC tier 1 and Chicago/Austin as tier 2.

I spend more time kind of looking at Durham for startups and small consulting firms. Adzerk, iContact, and back out in RTP, MaxPoint are startups at various points of existence. I have no idea what pay is like at startups. You might want to check out http://bigtop.it/jobs - they have both a job listing and host semi-regular mixer/job fair events. I went to one and didn't really pursue anything. It may have been a little entry-level leaning.

Oh, don't forget the local university tech scene. NC State is there in Raleigh (and RedHat is on Centennial Campus), Duke is Durham, and UNC-CH in Chapel Hill. If you are interested in being a staff coder in academia, there are opportunities in those places. Duke and UNC-CH also have big hospital orgs that hire buckets of IT staff - if you can shoehorn the word EPIC onto your resume, you can land something in one of those two quickly.

Weather is lovely, but hotter than the Bay area. Humidity and 99F is . . . nasty. And I'm a native NC'er. Good mix of sun and seasons during the year. Excellent beaches (and the Outer Banks) two to four hours driving. Same drive time West puts you at 4000 to 5000ft in the Appalachian mountains of NC.

Cost of living is ok. Housing cost varies too much to generalize. Cheaper, sometimes much, outside the cities. Good food given the college town status in all three. Reasonably active tech meetup scene.

If I was moving to the area and didn't have a partner or family, I would probably lean towards downtown Durham. I feel like it might be a little more funky and interesting than the other places. If I had a family or partner who wanted to start one soon, I might shop around for a school district I would be happy with and try to land there.

Oh, last thing - the Triangle has good political diversity, but I think once you leave it, the state is generally conservative with pockets with more progressive presence.