I was on a panel last Thursday at the Charlotte Tech Talent meetup at the Skookum building in NoDa. The topic was hiring engineers in the Southeast in 2025. About 80 people showed up. The other panelists were Maria from Lendmark and a guy named Ben from a stealth fintech whose name I won't put in writing because they asked me not to.

A few things came up that I thought were worth writing down.

Charlotte is not actually a tech hub yet

Maria said this and I agreed with her and the room got a little quiet. Charlotte has a lot of tech jobs but most of those jobs are inside the banks. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Truist. The technical work at these companies is real and hard but it does not generate the cultural infrastructure that a real tech hub has. There is no critical mass of engineers leaving big banks to start companies. There is no critical mass of engineers leaving startups to join other startups. The talent moves between the banks and back to the banks.

I told the room that we still hire 60 percent of our engineers from outside Charlotte. We make most of them relocate. The ones who already live here, we are grateful for, but we cannot fill the team with them.

This was a slightly uncomfortable thing to say at a Charlotte Tech Talent event. Sorry.

What we look for in candidates is changing

Ben made a point that I have been thinking about ever since. He said that the rise of AI coding tools has, in his opinion, made the bar for a good engineer higher, not lower. Because when the AI can write the boilerplate, the value of a human engineer is in judgment. Knowing what to build. Knowing when the AI is wrong. Knowing when to throw the AI's answer out and write the thing yourself.

I think he's right. We have started asking different questions in interviews this year. Less "can you implement this algorithm" and more "the AI wrote this code, what's wrong with it." About a third of senior candidates fail the second question. Which is interesting, because most of them would pass the first.

Comp in Charlotte is weird

Someone in the audience asked about comp. I told the truth, which is that Charlotte comp is somewhere between SF and a low cost remote market, and that the spread between the two has actually narrowed in the last 18 months. We pay our senior engineers within about 15 percent of what they would make at a comparable role in SF or NYC. We did not do this two years ago. We do it now because the candidates we want will not take a 40 percent pay cut to move here, even with the lower cost of living factored in.

Maria nodded a lot during this. Ben looked uncomfortable. I think his company is still paying Charlotte rates and losing candidates because of it.

One question I didn't have a good answer for

A woman near the back asked, "How do you compete with banks for the same talent." Honest answer: we mostly don't. The bank candidate and the startup candidate are usually not the same person. The bank candidate wants stability, structure, a clear ladder. The startup candidate wants ambiguity, equity, the chance to build something. There is some overlap but it's narrower than people think.

What we do compete on is the small subset of bank engineers who are bored and ready to leave. We sometimes pull these people in. They are great when they work out. About half the time they don't, because the structurelessness of a startup is genuinely jarring after a decade at Wells. I have probably hired six of these people in seven years. Three are still here. Three left within 18 months. Not a great hit rate.

I told her this. She nodded. I think she was already at the bank looking to make the jump and trying to figure out if she should.

I caught her after and told her she should email me. She did. We're talking next week.