This city does has non web related businesses. New York is known for finance and stocks. I have a friend who writes financial modeling software for a hedge fund. The scene does exist, but you have to go look for it. If you expect to go into a cafe and be surrounded by developers and tech folks, you will be vastly disappointed.
The more events and meetups I attend the more I realize that this city is full of great talent, interesting companies and even some reputable VC's. The biggest "problem" for me personally has been weeding through all the non tech people to find others who are doing things that interest me.
I found my job through nextNY (Bug Labs) and my girlfriend found hers through new-tech, and the connection from that job led to the one she is currently at.
Anecdotes != conclusions, but for us it worked very well.
We're often putting up new jobs. At the moment we are looking for a QA engineer and a business intern (that one is probably San Fransisco but I'm not sure).
I'm not very in tune with our hiring but for a while we were looking for development engineers too. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to drop a resume if you have experience with embedded Linux development (OpenEmbedded especially), JavaME/PhoneME, Eclipse plug-in development, and a passion for open source.
To be more clear, that is my overall take on New York. I cant really speak for the current NY job market as I haven't been searching. But I do have a few friends who have been laid off (interestingly none of the very qualified folks).
The job market isn't all that wonderful anywhere else either. What I think will happen is some the people laid off from the various wall street positions will go start boutique shops... Long term they will be bought out and merged together to create larger groups...
If you're talented it's still not a major issue to get a job in finance, lots of people are getting let go, but the good people are finding new jobs pretty quickly.
Plenty of banks are using this period to ramp up hiring to get the best talent for a bargin. C++ talent is always hard to hire regardless of the market.
The more events and meetups I attend the more I realize that this city is full of great talent, interesting companies and even some reputable VC's. The biggest "problem" for me personally has been weeding through all the non tech people to find others who are doing things that interest me.