I'm local, I know a ton of former Lexmark people, because they've already been all-but dead in Lexington for some time. They mostly only did R&D here for decades, and that group has been dwindling.
Large groups of Ex-Lexmark folk have ended up in other local tech companies, many ended up at OpenText (via HP via Exstream, the eventual successful startup from a local serial entrepreneur that basically makes the tools to do semi-individualized bulk mailing like bills), Badger (robots for doing retail work) was founded by folks leaving Lexmark, etc.
Amazon has been buying up their old buildings (long, long ago it used to be a sprawling IBM campus that did typewriters, printers, keyboards, compilers, EMI testing...) as they contract.
Like much of the US, Lexington has lost a bunch of manufacturing, but IBM/Lexmark as a major entity is already long gone.
It is funny that they've been bought by a cartridge cloner, and foreign private equity, and are now being bought by a competitor, they keep dying in new ignominious ways.
I really want to know what the deal is with OpenText (formerly MicroFocus). If you're not careful they will eventually buy your business and you will disappear.
> OpenText offers cloud-native solutions in an integrated and flexible Information Management platform to enable intelligent, connected and secure organizations.
I remember Lexmark just before things started to go bad for them, back when they still had a huge campus with multiple buildings, developers had their own office or shared with one other person and they owned their own huge park with a disk golf course. They even built a new building on campus for an employee daycare and acquired multiple software companies to add services on top of print.
We had huge teams of software engineers, embedded software developers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers chemists and specialists in microfluidics. We designed our own image processing ASICs, had specialists in color and perception, had a whole team dedicated to just Linux and dedicated software librarians. There was a team working just on Android. We contributed back to Linux as well as Yocto/Bitbake. The first sign of decline was when suddenly (for me anyway) they announced the closure and sale of their entire consumer inkjet division followed not long after by commercial inkjet. They sold all the inkjet assets off to a partner manufacturer company a bit like Foxconn.
It was wonderful for a while and I am sad to see things get potentially worse for them.
When they hired me out of college, they paid me a $5000 relocation bonus, paid a specialized company to organize the move (even offered to find me a realtor and help sell my house if I had one), paid the moving company in full, paid to have my car relocated there, paid for hotels during the move and then paid me another $5000 to cover any miscellaneous costs from moving that I might incur. They also paid the taxes for me somehow, I guess by adding extra to my paycheck. Never seen the like before or since.
Those were the days! I have great memories playing in the basketball league and playing pickup soccer on the giant fields.
I worked one internship in the color / image science lab, which was super interesting. I learned a lot about the human visual system and theories of image reproduction technology. One of the guys in the lab reached some legendary engineering status ("laureate", I think) for inventing a form of dithering that improved perceptual image quality.
I worked there for a very short stint. They hired me to write a programming language to help streamline the process of building installers. But I ended up being tasked with helping get Vista support out the door. I think I was there for less than 2 months. It’s the second-shortest stint in my career. It was a shadow of its former self by then, but it was really interesting to walk the vast manufacturing floors.
Lexington is the home of the University of Kentucky. Lexmark shuttering their plant wouldn’t be _good_ for the economy, but Lexington is first and foremost a “college town.”
The same is true of Rochester, NY, where Xerox came out of. I went to school there. In the old days the university fed into local employers (Xerox, Kodak), but now it's a college town where the university and its med school hospital is a big employer but there is huge wealth disparity, and not a lot of opportunity for the large population that is less educated and not affiliated with the school. Not a great situation.
Lexington has a surprising amount of employers, we should be fine. I doubt they're going to close the HQ anyway.
Did you know Tempur-Pedic is Lexington grown? Fast food chain fazolis is based here, long John silver's was. Valvoline moved here a long long time ago.
Hall Rogers is trying to make "silicon hallow" a thing so there's a lot of funding for tech companies to setup shop in Kentucky
I have a Fazoli's and a Xerox facility within 20 minutes of where I sit. I'm unsure I should see that as sign of a healthy economic situation for my neighborhood.
Yep, land-locked Lexington, Kentucky, home of Long John Silvers though we don’t even have one in town anymore. The last one closed a few years ago.
But yes, a Lexmark sale won’t make a large impact even if they shut down the HQ. There are local and remote (obviously) opportunities and the CoL is low here.
I live there and while I know people who used to work there and have friends of friends who do work there it’s not considered a major player in my mind. Toyota leaving would be a much bigger deal and we have a decent number of local tech jobs not to mention remote work from elsewhere.
That’s not to say I don’t care or am happy they got bought but Lexmark has been circling the drain for a solid decade.
Lexington, Kentucky will not be “devastated” by this at all. I doubt Lexmark is even in the top 10 of businesses people would name for being big players in Lexington.
Lexmark has been progressively closing their facilities there for years. They even sold some buildings this year [0]. Thay have only 14 positions open for their Lexington location, so I don't think they're a huge employer there anymore.
Most of the time, all you need is Walmart and Meijer, and you can also find those in Richmond, along with a decent number of other big-box stores and clothing stores and stuff. But yeah, Lexington is definitely a popular shopping destination.
Back when my grandparents lived in Richmond, we would go to Lexington for the mall (not the green roof one, the real one), because Richmond's mall was a decaying husk even in the 1990s, before Walmart moved out next to it, Sears went under, etc. I was surprised to see that it is still open, but I digress.
For context, Walmart employs about as many people in Lexington's three superstores and one neighborhood market as Lexmark does. Losing 2k jobs in a city of 320k people would not be catastrophic. And most of those jobs probably don't overlap with Xerox's business anyway, so I wouldn't expect that to happen.
