[_xerces_]

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.

[acjohnson55]

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.

[christophilus]

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.