
Why do companies treat their office address like a company secret? - masor
What are they afraid of? Don&#x27;t they realize that for every angry customer that might show up at their office to cause trouble, there are 1000 prospective employees that just want to get an idea of how long their new commute will take? Sometimes, it&#x27;s hard to even figure out what city they&#x27;re in.
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richardknop
It depends. But one of the reasons I can think of is if it is an early stage
startup or small company. They might be using co-working space like WeWork or
only have a virtual office and couple of employees working remotely/from home.

In such case they want to appear bigger than they are and if you could google
their address and find out it's a virtual office with 200 companies registered
there you might decide to look for a bigger / more established company instead
of going with them.

But even if your company's address is just a virtual office, you should list
it visibly on your website in my opinion. It doesn't look good when you appear
to be hiding it. There's nothing wrong with small business or new startup not
having a proper office from beginning.

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shubhamjain
A comical thing about many "cutting-edge" SaaS startups: no one wants to do
the website; no one owns it. I have seen it many times: marketing people
imploring the programmers to push a little change to the website, only to find
that no one is available for the task.

Logically, it makes sense as websites usually get updated only once in a while
and it would foolish to dedicate a resource to it. But, it also adds a great
difficulty in building a tiny thing, even if something like a contact page.

I guess big companies have more organised processes and teams to handle this.
But, in startups, everyone is already working on the core product and
everything else seems like a distraction.

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greenyoda
It's possible that if a company is very small, it works out of a co-working
space or has all of its employees working remotely in different locations.
They may be hiding this to make it appear to customers that they're bigger
than they really are.

But I agree that not telling prospective employees where they're located will
deter people from applying. For example, two places within a few miles of each
other in NYC can have drastically different commutes (time, comfort and/or
safety), so there's no way I'd consider applying for a job if I didn't know
the company's location.

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Gustomaximus
A business Im involved in does online surveys. As with anything there can be a
mistake or misunderstanding over an account credit or voucher type thing. Some
people can get very angry over this rather than lodge a report with our member
services team. We have seen people call into offices and give death threats
over $2. And while you can find our office address online, we keep it a little
hidden and don't encourage the location or phone number to be public. So
basically for us its to keep potential lunatics away.

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huehehue
My current company's CEO is a bit of an icon in the startup world, and his
fans can be...intense. If we leave the office door unlocked during work hours,
people can (and have) just waltzed in hoping to meet him. People also send all
sorts of weird gifts.

Since we were basically working out of a house for the longest time, whoever
was on hand would have to deal with the unwanted guest. If you're alone in the
office and some big dude comes in saying "Well I won't leave until I meet your
founder!", that can be scary.

As Gustomaximus puts it, it is to keep potential lunatics away.

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CyberFonic
Great question ! I have often wondered that too.

I can understand small companies, trying to cover up the fact that they are
still operating out of their garage or spare room. But when large corporations
do it, I am just flummoxed. For example if you look up Apple in the Sydney
(AU) whitepages, there is no address given just a free call number. I just
checked, Google now show their address, but in the past they didn't either.

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mchannon
I don't think it's sinister, I just think it's looked upon as extra work, with
no obvious upside.

For would-be competitors who want to send in spies, it's easier to move on to
other companies that publish addresses.

In the big 5 companies, the more hush-hush the R&D activities, the harder the
particular site is to find.

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mowenz
Can you give examples? Afaik most publish their address?

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aslkdjaslkdj
To prevent crazy people from doing something crazy. These buildings aren't
open to the public. Outside of your employment use case (in that case just ask
the recruiter for the building location; I've never had a problem with that),
the people trying to show up to an office building are probably trying to
complain or make a scene.

