SiliconBeat

Spansion, the bankrupt Sunnyvale flash memory maker that gave its executives a retention-based pay raise in February the same day it fired 3,000 workers, named its fourth chief financial officer in less than five months.

Randy Furr was named to replace Nathan Sarkisian, who served as interim CFO since May 20 when he replaced the previous Read the rest of this entry »

At least four professors at the Wharton School of Business contributed to an article about the challenges faced by Yahoo’s new chief executive titled: “Carol Bartz’s Challenge at Yahoo: Choose a Path, Build a Team and Do It Fast”.

Don’t worry about a lot of deep academic analysis. Here’s a sample of what Wharton management professor Lawrence Hrebiniak had to say: Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (pictured) resigned from the board of directors at eHealth Wednesday “so she could devote more of her time toRan personal and professional obligations,” according to a filing the online health insurance company made Friday announcing her replacement on the board, Stanford Chief Financial Officer Randall Livingston.

Sandberg once served as chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department during the Clinton Administration under Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who has been named President-elect Obama’s chief economic advisor. Between Treasury and Facebook, she worked at Google, serving as vice president in charge of online sales and operations. She was also instrumental in launching Google’s philanthropic arm, according to her Facebook bio.

It appears that the job of leading JDS Uniphase is slightly less valuable on a cash basis these days. The new chief executive as of Jan. 1, Thomas Waechter, will be paid $700,000 a year in salary, $100,000 less than the current CEO, Kevin Kennedy, according to a regulatory filing Thursday. Waechter, who joined the company a year ago in October, is currently an executive vice president in charge of JDS’s communications test & measurement group.

Kennedy, who told the company in October he would be resigning, isn’t going far. Like so many executives, he’ll be retained as a consultant for awhile, and he’ll continue Read the rest of this entry »

Intersil, the Milpitas chip maker, said Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner has resigned  “to pursue another opportunity.” His replacement, effective immediately, is the company’s current corporate controller, Jonathan Kennedy,  who joined Intersil in 2004 as director of finance, according to a regulatory filing this afternoon.

Zinser, who joined Intersil in 1999 as its corporate treasurer and became CFO in July 2005, will remain an employee of the company through a transition period. No word yet on what or where his new opportunity is.

Intersil’s former chief executive, Richard Beyer, also quit earlier this year citing the chance to “pursue another opportunity.” He was named CEO of Freescale Semiconductor, an Austin-based chip maker focused on analog devices. In October, Beyer told Bloomberg News that he thought chances for a chip recovery in the second half of next year “optimistic”.

Qun Zhou was reappointed interim Chief Financial Officer at Vermillion, the Fremont company formerly known as Ciphergen Biosystems that develops medical diagnostic tests, to replace the previous interim CFO Richard Taylor, who had served in that function as a consultant to the company since August.

Taylor and Vermillion agreed not to renew his consulting agreement, which expired on November 26,  “by mutual consent.”

Zhou served as controller at Vermillion since February 2007, and served as its interim CFO from November 1, 2007 to August 26, 2008. Prior to joining the company, Zhou served as Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s see. An  historic presidential election is coming to a climax with a surge of voters causing long lines at polling places. The nation, even the world, shivers with anticipation over the results. Good time to release significant pieces of personnel news?

That’s what Apple did this morning by posting a press release announcing the hiring of an ex-IBM vice president, Mark Papermaster, to head up its devices hardware engineering division. The news had actually been reported last week by CNet, via a court filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in which IBM claimed that Papermaster would be working closely with Apple CEO Steve Jobs in what IBM believes is Read the rest of this entry »

IPass, the Redwood City developer of business-mobility software that has been struggling with disgruntled investors this year who have urged the company to sell itself, named a new chief executive Monday to take over later this month to replace current CEO Kenneth Denman, who will be leaving the company (drum roll, please) “to pursue other business opportunities.”

One job Denman will immediately give up is Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Lange has rejoined Exponent (Nasdaq:EXPO), the Menlo Park engineering and scientific consulting firm that was known as Failure Analysis when Lange left the company in 1994 to join General Motors. (We always got a kick out of its former ticker symbol, FAIL.) Lange is now a group vice president responsible for vehicle engineering, biomechanics, human factors, data & statistical sciences and visual communications practices.

While at GM, Lange served as Read the rest of this entry »

PLX Technology announced the hiring Ralph Schmitt as its new chief executive Monday. He’s replacing Michael Salameh, who has been CEO since co-founding the company in 1986, according to an SEC filing today.

Schmitt, a Cypress Semiconductor marketing executive from 1999 to 2005 when he left to become CEO of Sipex, an analog semiconductor company which merged with Exar, a fabless semiconductor company, in August 2007. In 2008 he left to work Read the rest of this entry »