Roswell is run similarly to a college campus (I've had previous experience supporting NY State colleges), meaning there are many departments, each run fairly independently of each other and each with different technical needs.
The departments usually fall in one of three categories: there is an educational group that works with UB's medical campus, a clinical component that treats patients, and obviously a heavy research component. During my time here, there have been at least four startups/companies that have formed as a result of research I've helped support.
Roswell currently has about 3,300+ employees. The Programmer/Analyst positions you have seen are an attempt to fill needed positions in various departments.
Everyone's version of "cool technologies" is different. I'm of the opinion, for the most part, whatever gets the job done thoroughly and accurately works.
In the past nine years I've written and maintain about 20+ applications in VBscript, C#, Actionscript, PHP, Ruby, etc with the various associated frameworks. Since every department requires something slightly different I've had to adapt as needed. However, recently we've been running with an inhouse PHP framework called Surebert which was/is written by a co-worker.
Interestingly enough for me, I've never written anything professionally in Java, but a lot of my co-workers have.
Out of the five of us on the web team, I'm the Apple fanboy. So I'm on a MacBook, iPhone, etc. Another one is on Fedora, another is using a Dell (ugh). To each their own.
And Roswell lets me moonlight on the side. I've had fairly steady freelancing gigs for a couple years now.
Interesting place to work. Good people. Very little complaints (nothing's perfect).
