[vineyardmike]

Interesting that the official headquarters is in Connecticut even though employees are in Rochester.

Every business I can think of that has a “headquarters” separate from their largest employee pool seems to be in decline… GE, Boeing being big obvious examples. It seems like moving the executives away from the day to day work is a sign the business doesn’t care about itself anymore. I’m curious if there are any other examples, or any counter examples to this.

[arrakeenrevived]

Boeing moved their HQ to Chicago in 2001, and experienced wildly successful growth from 2001 until 2019. Seems like it might be recency bias to correlate Boeing decline with its HQ location.

Exxon is another example I can think of. Until recently, their HQ was in a tiny building in Irving, TX while the majority of their workforce was elsewhere.

There's also a whole slew of companies that have a lot of employees "in the field" that are separate from their corporate workforce and would inherently be HQed in locations other than where their large employee bases are, eg manufacturing companies, Intel, car manufacturers, Walmart, UPS, several airlines, banks... Even Boeing would fall into this category. I'm not sure how those factor into things.

[loudmax]

Aircraft design and build has a very long lead time. It's plausible that Boeing success in the early 2000's was the result of sound decisions and long-term planning that were made early on. The emphasis on immediate shareholder returns you get from squeezing R&D or QA would take a long time to manifest itself in the actual product.

[dan_quixote]

It's worth noting that the product and sales cycle for commercial aviation is measured in many years. And...2001/2002 was quite a bad time for commercial aviation as well.

[axus]

Don't headquarters usually move to accommodate where the CEO wants to live?

[vineyardmike]

That’s the point. Is “being near the CEO” a sign a weakness. That the CEO cares more about their own comfort instead of being close to the people that make the business work.

[throwup238]

Tesla? Their HQ is in Texas but their “engineering HQ” is in the Bay Area. Since the Fremont factory has more employees than the Texas gigafactory (according to their wikipedia pages), that probably holds true for Tesla.

[davio]

Lumen (AKA CenturyLink) has their HQ in Monroe, LA despite all of the execs being in Denver. I always assumed this was some sort of lucrative tax scheme.

[maverick2007]

I was an intern at CenturyLink the summer they opened their new building in Monroe. Monroe was not fun to live in but the building was gorgeous and great to work in. From my understanding, the building sadly sits more or less empty now as more and more of the workforce moves to Denver (aka home of Level 3 who more or less took over CenturyLink after being acquired).

[lotsofpulp]

I don’t see what that scheme could be, it’s not like they can avoid state taxes by doing that.

The only benefit given by the state in exchange for “headquarters” is employing a certain number of people at a certain income. But if all your payroll stays somewhere else, then what could possibly be the incentive for tax breaks?

[davio]

States will probably bend over backwards when you are 1 of their 2 Fortune 500s

"To secure the latest corporate retention project, the State of Louisiana offered CenturyLink a competitive incentive package that includes an annual performance-based grant, subject to company payroll performance. In addition, the agreement creates funding for information technology faculty, curricula and education at Louisiana Tech University, where the state has supported the Clarke M. Williams Professorship in Telecommunications in honor of the company’s founder."

https://news.lumen.com/2019-04-02-Gov-Edwards-And-Centurylin...

[lotsofpulp]

That is in agreement with what I wrote. There is no tax benefit just for labeling an office “headquarters”.

> subject to company payroll performance.

[pwarner]

their history goes deep in LA (to the 1930s), if not Monroe specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_Technologies#History but as others mention, L3 and or Qwest execs likely runs the show now.