NXP confirmed to the local paper that layoffs are occurring this week. No numbers or departments were identified. Affected employees were being given the "standard" package. Anyone have more details?
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The standard package is 24 weeks (six months ) of severance. You also keep your medical and dental for that six month time frame. I know, because I have accepted a severance.
Too many creepy managers which accounting degrees, not enough innovative thinkers. Relied too much on lawyers and in the end became just another ARM vendor. Sad.
Anyone from Austin can give us the scale of the layoffs?
Freescale and its predecessor, Motorola Semiconductor, played a huge part in getting Austin started in the chip business. In 1974, Motorola expanded from its base in the Phoenix area to build the first chip plant in Central Texas. Motorola wound up building five chip plants in Austin and hiring thousands of workers to design products to be made in those plants.
The company reached its peak local employment of more than 11,000 in the late 1990s. Freescale now employs about 5,000 people in the area.
Bill Walker, who rose from a technician job to top management in 36 years with the company in Phoenix and Austin, remembers the company’s rapid expansion in the 1980s and 1990s as his favorite part of his life. The company was expanding and successful and taking on big challenges. He oversaw teams that managed the startup of two billion-dollar factories in Austin, both of which were industry trendsetters for their time.
“It was the most fun time of my life,” Walker said. He retired from the company in 2004 as general manager of Motorola’s global semiconductor operations. The best part of his career, he recalled, was from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s.
“We worked 12 and 15 hours a day, and we worked some weekends,” he said. “There was a ton of pressure. You had to get products moving fast (into production) because there was so much competition. We were doing something that nobody else had done at the time. A lot of people I knew at Motorola later told me it was the best time of their careers.”
But the good times didn’t last.