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First, I'd like to thank those of you that take the time to contribute to this forum. I've never posted before, but have been reading a while ("long-time listener, first time caller.")
Anyway, I've heard from a few of you that the job market isn't great. Yet, Kiplinger's magazine spoke highly of it this past spring, and my personal observation (from sites like Careerbuilder, Monster, etc.) is that there is more opportunity than other well-regarded markets (such as the Harrisburg area, where I am currently located - about whom Kiplinger's also spoke highly).
So, I guess my question is how good or not-so-good is it? (For what it's worth, I'm an Information Technology Analyst/Project Manager)
The best way to judge a metro area's job market is to observe its population trends. After all, people move to wherever the jobs are from wherever they aren't. In the last few decades the Pittsburgh area has seen growth in the outlying areas. But this is misleading, as it has been the result of people moving from the city outward; Pittsburgh Proper's population once stood at nearly 700,000. Today it's just over 300,000. This trend continues to this day: Pittsburgh Proper's population has declined 15% in the last 15 years.
The Pittsburgh metro area as a whole has seen almost zero population growth in the last 4 decades, during which time the U.S. population grew by one third, strongly suggesting the Pittsburgh job market is is not expanding. Ongoing discussion of area business organizations still centers around how to change this, tacitly acknowledging that it is still the current state of affairs.
Don't get me wrong. Despite the difficulty Pittsburgh has had in finding its feet, it's still a very liveable city. I loved Pittsburgh during the short two years that I lived there and I did not want to leave. The main reason I did leave was because of the stifling job market. Another reason was the utter frustration of watching a great city slowly commit suicide.
Thanks for the reply. Two follow-ups: in what industry do you work? where did you move to escape the 'stifling' job market?
Thanks again.
I have a political science degree, meaning I'm in whatever industry I can get a job in. (I'm currently attending law school to remedy that situation.) While in Pittsburgh I was doing "cartographical data analysis" (translation: I was doing FEMA flood-zone determinations for properties with liens held by FDIC-backed lending isntitutions). I was making $8.00/hr. I had people with Masters degrees urban planning and criminology working beside me doing the same thing and getting paid the same thing.
That said, my then-wife graduated with an HCI Masters from Carnegie-Mellon which was why we were in Pitt in the first place. As hard as Pittsburgh is trying to make itself a high-tech center -- the mid-Atlantic San Jose if you will -- on the strength of CMU's presence there, it hasn't quite taken yet. Even with an advanced IT degree from one of the best tech schools in the country, my ex just could not shop her services there. We moved to Chicago where both our salaries nearly doubled. The cost of living difference ate into some of that but we were still much better off and in a better position to pay down our school loans.
Google recently opened a facility in Pittsburgh so maybe that will be the start of something. But to read from civic, business and academic sources in the area, there is not a lot of momentum yet. A good source of info on the subject with links to primary sources is pittsblog.blogspot.com run by a Pitt Law professor.
I've read a little more about Google's presence in Pittsburgh. They set up shop in CMU's new Collaborative Information Center. Intel and Apple also have operations there as well. I don't mean to be pessimistic as this is obviously a positive development, but since this is a collaboration between the university and the corporations, the manpower is going to be drawn from students who are already at the university; that is, it's not going to bring a lot of new talent to the area or retain existing talent as it graduates from CMU. Retaining CMU's graduates is what Pittsburgh has been trying to do, so far unfortunately without much success.
Mike Madison (the guy who runs pittsblog.blogspot.com) is, I think, right on about the prevalent culture in Pittsburgh as pertains to the roles of employers vs. employees and how this has been an impedement to long-term growth in the area. His thesis is something I had observed myself while I was there, but he has fleshed it out a little better than I had. Said thesis is, in summary, that Pittsburgh's culture still has strong remnants of a top-down managerial style where the wealthy and their white-collar managers had all the ideas and resources; and the blue-collar class, in exchange for being the worker bees that made it all happen, had a certain expectation of entitlement to employment security.
Things have changed since those days: large corporations with their cumbersome bureucracies and aversion to risk are no longer the sole source of innovation; ideas can come from anywhere and a grunt with an idea and ambition can become wealthy in in his own right; with competition having become global and quite fierce, employment is more fickle, unstable and transient as ever. One must now be prepared for the fact that a job is no longer an expectation or an entitlement. And it cuts both ways: people leave for better opportunity just as often (or probably more so) than they are handed a pink slip.
Pittsburgh's culture has not only not kept up, but Pittsburghers are very suspicious of outsiders who try to change this culture. They view it as an attack on their traditions. In a way, they're right -- it is an attack on their traditions... not because those traditions are contemptible or don't deserve their proper respect, but because they no longer obtain in today's economy.
This has been part of Pittsburgh's problem: the culture clings to the glory of its past so tightly that it is very reluctant to change the culture from that which worked in the past to that which works today; and it sees any attempt to abandon yesterday's economic models in favor today's economic reality as an attack on its present-day values.
The sooner Pittsburgh learns that letting go of its past does not mean dishonoring it, the sooner it can move forward and achieve economic glory anew.
I agree. I can't get a job in the Pittsburgh area doing what I do in Maryland, despite the need. If I could, it would mean I had an advanced degree AND that I would still make half what I make now without one. Of course the cost of living would go down but the taxes are higher so all in all I would lose.
One national company (I left for a different position AND due to too many Pittsburgh managers), lost a great deal of its workforce and credibility when it put a lot of Pittsburghers in charge of different divisions. They thought that since the Pittsburgh workers did so much, almost obsessively working, that they would make good managers; but the idea in Pittsburgh is to play the good little employee until you are a manager, at which point you then get to sit back and make everyone else work their tails off to keep a job - you only work hard or appear to do so, to impress YOUR boss so you can take their job when they die or retire or quit. That works in an area where if you give the boss lip, there are 10 jobless people who would happily take your place and kiss up to the boss, but it doesn't translate well in the rest of the world. They lost a strong base of experienced employees in those departments run by Pittsburghers, mostly due to a company focus against the micromanaging that Pittsburghers are infamous for - people were used to the company focus and not the focus of the Pittsburghers and couldn't transfer out - EVERYONE wanted to transfer out so the list was long. They ended up having to sell the company due to a lot of missteps, but one was the hemorrhage of experienced people who wouldn't work under those circumstances - and who even warned the powers that be about the Pittsburgh mentality and micromanagement as the problem.
Let's not forget the seniority mentality while we are at it. Don't dare get yourself hired into a top level job when there are internal people who wanted it, even if they are not qualified. Also, don't leave and come back - you will RUN the other way as you are a "traitor" for leaving. I couldn't wait to leave - TWICE! It didn't help I had experience at my profession in another area of the country; it didn't matter that my spouse was a military career person and we retired near places we could use our benefits; we LEFT, we DESERTED, and we DIDN'T COME BACK "HOME" after retirement. I went back during the first Gulf war when active military families of active duty sent there were forced off military bases as their spouses weren't "attached" to that command anymore so the families had to leave pronto. I found out that no matter how inept a colleague was, if they were more senior than I was, they didn't have to put in as soon for vacations or holidays; they were given first choice, and if you didn't like when you got to take a vacation or a holiday - tough. They could get a job for which they were not qualified solely on the basis of seniority; ability wasn't taken into account unless someone as senior or more senior applied. You got the job when they died, retired, or quit. And if you got an OK for a day off or a vacation, and someone more senior applied after you did, your time off was revoked since you weren't senior. Morale in most Pittsburgh workplaces suffers. There is a brain drain - if you're smart, you figure it has to be better elsewhere, move away, find out you were right, and stay away.
This top down style is a reason why unions flourish even though many do little or nothing for the worker. It is the only chance at protection that the ordinary worker has. And unionization in an environment like that is a real issue.
Said thesis is, in summary, that Pittsburgh's culture still has strong remnants of a top-down managerial style where the wealthy and their white-collar managers had all the ideas and resources; and the blue-collar class, in exchange for being the worker bees that made it all happen, had a certain expectation of entitlement to employment security.
I don't disagree, but isn't this culture present in large corporations everywhere? I can attest it exists in the corporations for whom I've worked (in Central PA and upstate NY). Or, do you think it is less prevalent in more "progressive" areas (sorry - hate to use that word, having read one of your previous posts, but you know what I mean)?
Thanks.
Last edited by bboy36win; 12-10-2006 at 07:48 PM..
I don't disagree, but isn't this culture present in large corporations everywhere? I can attest it exists in the corporations for whom I've worked (in Central PA and upstate NY). Or, do you think it is less prevalent in more "progressive" areas (Minneapolis comes to mind)?
I think the more successful corporations, or at least the corporations that have risen to prominence in the last 30 or so years, have been better at facilitating communication between the upper management and middle management/labor, making it more of a two way street, rather than just issuing commands from on high and that being the end of it. I also think the more nimble corporations are more proactive in searching out, detecting and elevating talent within its ranks. I believe there is more upward mobility in the contemporary corporate structure than there was in the old top-down model. Maybe that's just because much of the menial work has been moved overseas or eliminated altogether through mechanization/automation, and because many new corporations don't actually manufacture anything but do research or provide financial or consulting services, so you don't have the stark divide of white-collar management overseeing a large blue-collar workforce.
But my point was not that the regional corporations themselves cling to the old-model mentality. Maybe some do, but I would bet most would love to shed this structure because it is impeding their growth. Those that got tired of fighting it packed up and moved to Charlotte or Wilmington or some other place that does not have such a strongly engrained old-school economic culture. (Witness the recent merger and pending departure of Mellon Bank, one of the city's largest corporations, leaving exactly one native major financial institution. My advice: buy PNC stock. Now. They're probably next in the Merger/Acquisition Game, and Pittsburgh will then be left with zero native major financial corporations.) On the same note, I think it's no accident that none of the newer, more nimble corporations, with the possible exception of biotech and medical research companies, are located in Pittsurgh, or anywhere else between Cleveland and Rochester for that matter. And even Pittsburgh's biotech/medical research industry is only there because Pitt is there and operates as its own cultural island in the sea as academia frequently does. No university medical center, no biotech industry.
My point is that the entire regional culture -- not the the corporations themselves -- still has has the top-down mentality. That is to say, the workforce itself is clinging to the past. Pittsburgh is still a strong union town, or at least it still holds on to strong blue-collar union values, which basically says "give me a job that doesn't require a lot of intellectual challenge, and pay me a lot of money to do it, and in exchange I will give you my loyalty and be content with my role as a worker bee."
The whole regional culture refuses to come to grips with the fact that these sort of blue-collar jobs are gone and they are never coming back. There is no recognition that the individual is now his own primary agent in determining his economic destiny; that employers are never again going to just hand out jobs to anyone who wants one but rather you now have to go shop your services to them and explain to them why your services are valuable to them. With the exception of mom-and-pop shops, there is simply no culture of initiative and entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh. Venture capitalists who come in from the outside shopping for an idea simply can't find anyone who is interested. So they take their money and go elsewhere. And much of the Rust Belt economy continues to languish because the culture will not adjust.
Two thoughts occured while reading the discussions above:
- net population growth in an area doesn't tell the whole story. I'm not sure how births and deaths balance out, but I've heard that PGH has an older-than-average population, which would suggest deaths outnumber births. If that's the case, then there must have been some migration into the area to keep the net population stable for the last four decades. This would be even more the case if there had also been people moving out of the area. I guess my point is that there has probably been more "new blood" in the PGH area than you'd guess from the net population change;
- I worked 20 years for a major (really huge) oil company in Houston. The attitude of management and workers you describe absolutely did not exist there. I know what you're describing - I've seen it in other companies - but it's not just the size of the company that determines the culture. The top competitors in many industries couldn't survive like that. I don't believe I could stand to work in the environment you describe...I'd constantly be holding my breath, worried that my incompetence would be discovered.
Two thoughts occured while reading the discussions above:
- net population growth in an area doesn't tell the whole story. I'm not sure how births and deaths balance out, but I've heard that PGH has an older-than-average population, which would suggest deaths outnumber births. If that's the case, then there must have been some migration into the area to keep the net population stable for the last four decades. This would be even more the case if there had also been people moving out of the area. I guess my point is that there has probably been more "new blood" in the PGH area than you'd guess from the net population change;
Pittsburgh Metro's population has remained constant over the last 50 years while in that time the nation's population has doubled. Yes, deaths do outnumber births in the Pittsburgh metro, thanks to the older average age that resulted in a large outflow of the younger workforce in the 80s. But this has only been the case for the last 15 years. It does not explain the previous 35 years of population stagnation. Yes, there has been some inflow to stabilize the population -- but only enough to stabilize it, not to expand it. If you look at it in terms of the Pittsburgh Metro's population as a proportion of the national population, it is actually a net loss of 50% over the last 50 years. That's because the job market has not been able to accomodate anything but a stagnant population.
Quote:
- I worked 20 years for a major (really huge) oil company in Houston. The attitude of management and workers you describe absolutely did not exist there. I know what you're describing - I've seen it in other companies - but it's not just the size of the company that determines the culture. The top competitors in many industries couldn't survive like that. I don't believe I could stand to work in the environment you describe...I'd constantly be holding my breath, worried that my incompetence would be discovered.
Well I've described two corporate cultures, both in very general terms, and neither dependent on size, so I'm not sure which one you're referring to. But again, my argument with Pittsburgh in particular is not with the culture of the corporations themselves, though some of them may be part of the problem. My argument is that the whole culture is an impediment to growth, even -- no, especially-- the culture that inhabits the citizens/workforce.
Last edited by Drover; 12-11-2006 at 10:53 AM..
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