Rochester is home to a large number of Xerox, Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, and Johnson & Johnson former employees. On top of the corporations, we also have a few colleges here.
When the Dot-com Bubble burst in 2001, the Rochester area had a large number of IT staff flood the job market looking for work. As a result, the number of jobs available twindled significantly and with the over-abundance of IT staff, it took quite a while for it to rebound.
I was out of work for 14 months until I could land something in the IT field. While I looked in other industries, nothing could cover the expenses that we had at the time, and so I waited.