Buffalo Rising Online

but according to their own rankings, we were 38th last quarter, slipping 7 notches to 45. This is good news, why?

45th out of 50. thats awesome. is the glass 90% empty? F@#$ no, this is buffalo rising...buffalo's home for foolish optimism...THE GLASS IS 10% FULL INDEED!

I guess that's good, unless you are actually considering it a competition with the *** 44 **** cities that did better than Buffalo, and which would seem to be calling people to move on to brighter horizons. But that's only if you want to look at it from a self-interested, career-oriented point of view. Not everyone is so damn ...selfish. It's good to be #45. I think we should have a big foam finger manufactured on it, with the logo "We're # Forty-Five! Hooray!"

It's all good! The Buffalo job market isn't as bad as people make it sound, unless of course you are an ex-Bethlehem Steel worker who is still waiting for something to open up in your chosen field. The problem with Buffalo is that there is little depth in the market. There are only a couple dozen major employers who are hiring and most of the high salary jobs are specialized. Great if you are a Mechanical Engineer with a background in Cryogenics or a Seasoned Finance Professional with 20+ years in Middle Market and Derivatives. The market sucks if you want to change employers or if you want to find a career outside of back-office banking and finance. The other thing about Buffalo is that you are competing with people who have 20+ years experience, even when you are looking for a low-ranking position. The other thing about Buffalo is the market is all about who you know. The jobs at my company are almost always filled by someone's neighbor's cousin's golf partner's brother. The jobs are there, you just have to be on top of your game to get a lot of them. Competition is key except for the unions but that is a different topic all together. Buffalo is great if you have a job, but you better work hard to keep it because there aren't a whole lot of other jobs to jump to.

I like looking at the Linked In profiles for people from Buffalo. They all work or have worked for the same 10 companies.

The greatest thing about Buffalo is that you can live off a civil servant's or laborer's salary and feel like you are getting ahead of the Jones's. Compare this to top tier markets where you can work your ass off for an executive position and still feel like you are behind the ball.

It's all good! The Buffalo job market isn't as bad as people make it sound, unless of course you are an ex-Bethlehem Steel worker who is still waiting for something to open up in your chosen field. The problem with Buffalo is that there is little depth in the market. There are only a couple dozen major employers who are hiring and most of the high salary jobs are specialized. Great if you are a Mechanical Engineer with a background in Cryogenics or a Seasoned Finance Professional with 20+ years in Middle Market and Derivatives. The market sucks if you want to change employers or if you want to find a career outside of back-office banking and finance. The other thing about Buffalo is that you are competing with people who have 20+ years experience, even when you are looking for a low-ranking position. The other thing about Buffalo is the market is all about who you know. The jobs at my company are almost always filled by someone's neighbor's cousin's golf partner's brother. The jobs are there, you just have to be on top of your game to get a lot of them. Competition is key except for the unions but that is a different topic all together. Buffalo is great if you have a job, but you better work hard to keep it because there aren't a whole lot of other jobs to jump to.

I like looking at the Linked In profiles for people from Buffalo. They all work or have worked for the same 10 companies.

The greatest thing about Buffalo is that you can live off a civil servant's or laborer's salary and feel like you are getting ahead of the Jones's. Compare this to top tier markets where you can work your ass off for an executive position and still feel like you are behind the ball.

Sleepl8 and Overplayed,

There is some mildly good news in this post, and all the writer did was inform us of it. What has your sarcasm done for Buffalo?

Oak...There is some truth in our sarcasm. Some of us are cinical and appreciate the humor in eachothers snide remarks. others of us like to blow sunshine up everyones ass when buffalo is mentioned in a national forum or when some developer proposes some huge development that never makes it past the pretty rendering phase. to me...this article is weak sunshine. mostly cloudy...like the weather today...

BlueDevil - No big deal but you meant to write Pittsburgh is the city with 41.86 listings. Cleveland is higher than Buffalo in the list - number 30 with 62.46 listings.

Eric - What's the good news being posted? That Buffalo isn't 46th or lower out of 50 cities? Okay that's good but setting the bar very low. The five cities below Buffalo according to Indeed.com are New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Miami, Detroit, and Rochester.

You can't be saying the 0.17% on the graph is good news. That 0.17% on far right of graph (following all the "growth") is around half of the 0.30% we'd expect based on metro Buffalo's population as a percent of the U.S. (1 million people here divided by 300 million U.S. population is around 0.003, or 0.30%).

So metro Buffalo has around 0.30% of the U.S. population, but accoring to the graph only around 0.17% of on-line job ads. Hooray! Yeah right, Sleepl8 and overplayed are really the problem. Sure.

This is a bunch of crap. A lot of the listings for Buffalo are actually located elsewhere. Many companies will post their listings in other cities and say "relocation required". This tends to work best in post-industrial paradises like Buffalo. I typed in "actuary" into their search engine and restricted the search to the buffalo area, as an example. Once upon a time I worked in the extremely dull world of insurance and I knew there are like 4 credentialled actuaries in the entire Buffalo area so this would be a good example. I got 5 hits and only 1 was here. Not counting duplicates it's still 1 out of three. Also, as anyone who has wasted his or her time on such sites can attest, many postings are there to build resume banks and are rarely used to actually hire people. And another thing, there are many duplicates. This overall is a pretty bad statistic to use. Still, it somehow captures Buffalo's mediocrity in giving it a 45/50 ranking. Nice job. There are cities where things are even worse. Why are they uising it as a selling point? Because it's better than the percentage from last year? If it's the bottom 10 percent now, what was it before, last place? Oh yes, I'm excited, the Buffalo job market has gone from utter suckitude to just extreme mediocrity. Let's treat ourselves to piles of Buffalo wings, woohoo....

EricOak and others: I think articles like this can do a better job. I know where you are coming from because the articles and comments coming from BuffaloRising (and in my experience, from conversations with people around the city) seem to trend in one of two wildly different directions: Overhyped/Overenthusiastic or Cynical/Pessimistic. What's the *real* reason that either of those tones are bad for a person to adopt, or bad for a writer to employ? Answer: Un-reality. They are actually BOTH unrealistic and unuseful attitudes. An overhyped/overenthusiastic article or an overcynical comment both are leading people ... nowhere. Either self-satisfied and self-congratulatory, or self-wallowing and cynical. I would much prefer to see articles and comments that are balanced and reflect the reality of the situation, that talk realistically about the situation, the good and bad aspects of it, and *where we really need to go from here* and some suggestions on *how to get there* so we are not left sitting there thinking everything is fantastic or wallowing in self-defeating cynicism. Again I think that historically, those two extremes tend be part the overall dynamic of the town. I propose a new dynamic where we encourage people to deal with reality, to face both the good and bad in a balanced way and set about action items for reducing the bad and improving ourselves at all times. You can't get on that track if you have your head in the sand and are busy thinking everything is terrific. Nothing in this article seems especially worthy of celebration. Instead it almost reads like "if you thought you lived in employment hell... you're wrong! we aren't *actually* in hell! hooray!' OK, I acknowledge that, but let's look at more ideas on why we are #45 and look at how #1-44 are doing things, and what we can learn about why they are successful, and how we can move up that ladder. I'm of the mindset (having a healthy dose of self-interest), that we ought to be #7 or 8. That seems more fitting for my hometown. Now, how do we get there? That's an article I'd like to read, and I'd also like to see follow-up articles and progress reports against some of those ideas to improve the situation, to show that people are trying to compete with those other cities.

spitzer...thanks for the spell check...can you spell ASSHOLE?