Let’s see, not counting tempo jobs I had before or during college, I’ve been employed by four places for regular paychecks (not counting consulting). All are still in business. Two of those places I knew would be only of a couple of months duration. The other tow I worked at for 7 and 35 years.
Do I win a prize?
None of the companies I used to work for exist anymore except one… a language school in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia where I worked for 6 months.
Not necessarily companies, because I’ve worked for some behemoths, but of the products I worked on only one is still a thing outside my current company.
The company I interned for designed software for smartphones. It had this amazing feature that would wirelessly sync your email to your phone. But wait, it would do a push sync, so you would get your email without having to sync manually! And if you can believe it, it would even give you a notification when this happened, so you could find out you had gotten email immediately! Can you imagine a sales executive or manager NOT having this? It’s a game-changer! Plus it works on Palm Pilot, Symbian, Windows, OR Blackberry phones! It’s like there’s no reason not to get this product if you give your employees smart phones!
Of course, iPhone and Android came out with that feature natively, and the company went the way of the dodo bird, but not before being bought by a huge multinational. Luckily I had finished my internship by then.
My first company out of undergrad had me working on a platform to provide consistent look-and-feel for their webapps (they had bought a bunch of smaller companies and wanted to stardardize the UIs across product). Then the recession hit and any business unit that wasn’t directly providing profit got axed. Luckily I was in grad school when that happened.
My first company out of grad school was in healthcare software. The MOST mismanaged project I have ever been on. After blowing $750MM (that is not a typo) on it, the whole thing was canned at 100% loss two months after I quit.
Second company suffered from the “one client is 80% of the business” issue - when that one client left, so did all the custom work we did for them.
Third company was not so bad, a lot of my work was writing small self-contained applications that feed or were fed by the big behemoth they had developed through outsourcing. Eventually they brought the outsourced parts in house and it landed in my lap. I ended up replacing the main app and all the ancillary apps with a ‘one-stop-shop’ app that was much easier for the product people to use and set up. Basically coded myself out of a job. I quit and left for greener pastures before anyone realized that they didn’t need me anymore. I think they have since had over 50% of their R&D leave through attrition with no need to replace. I guess that replacement app really delivered!
Now I’m at my current company. Nothing exciting to report thus far.
I recall seeing the sign traveling past Millington before the freeway when I was a kid.
I wondered what the hell the Navy was doing in Tennessee.
First real job: It was private when I started, then went public, then acquired, then sold off (& closed). Three different corporate names over the years.
Third job was a start-up that was acquired by a Yuuuge multi-national shortly after I got there. The parent company is still in business but that location isn’t.
The EDS call center I used to work at in the latter half of the 1990’s is now vacant. I left there in 1998 for my current job. I happened to be in that city about 5 years ago and decided to drive by the old building and WOW did it look terrible.
There were overgrown bushes and trees. The parking lot had a lot of weeds, and the sign from the building was starting to fall down. I felt a little nostalgic because that building was where I started my career, but I didn’t shed any tears. My time at that EDS building trained me in my career, but also had a lot of really bad managers.
I’m glad that company is no more.
Two of the places I used to work for are gone. The buildings are still there but the companies are gone.
The clothing store I worked at right out of high school was part of a chain that filed bankruptcy and closed all the stores a few years after I worked there. I also worked for an independent pharmacy that got bought out by one of the big chains.
The former clothing store is now a real-estate office and the pharmacy is now a restaurant.
Funny thing is, the company I currently work for is still open (as far as I know anyways, I’ve been on vacation this week!), but is in its’ third physical location in the four years I’ve worked there. Company was outgrowing the headquarters building, so they started building a new home office. Company sold the previous home office building and there were delays in the construction of the new one so we had to move to a temporary location for about a year.
You mean Mare Island? I thought most of the buildings are still there, even if the base itself was decommissioned. (In fact, they tape the new version of BattleBots there.) Concord and Alameda, on the other hand, are pretty much wiped clean (well, except for the port area at Concord) and being redeveloped.
Out of eleven employers, nine are still going strong, and the buildings are still there for all of them (going by Google Maps).
The first was the telemarketing gig. That’s not terribly surprising, given the managerial incompetence. Seriously, why do people assume good salespeople will make good managers? They closed up shop not long after I found a job that didn’t instill rage - I went to work in a restaurant kitchen.
The other was the downtown restaurant. In their case, it had little to do with the business itself, and more with the three year replacement of the street in front. However, it’s Target Plaza South - pretty unlikely that comes down any time in the next few decades.
Being an ex-college prof, the “workplace” thing is either one of two cases (counting both where I worked as a student as well as regular faculty):
Do you mean the college in general? All still there and doing fine.
Do you mean the places where these departments were? All moved at some point. Only one while I still worked there (and is still in that place). All to new buildings. So I sort of can’t go “home” again in a way for the most part. But all the old buildings are still there. So I sort of can.
Precollege: All gone for all practical purposes.