SiliconBeat

Raise your hand if you recently quit your job and in the process got a severance package that was bigger than what you’d have gotten if you were let go by your employer?

Avistar Communications, the San Mateo company that was delisted from the Nasdaq stock market last month, reported today that Read the rest of this entry »

Could it be that Yahoo is finding it harder to hire a new chief financial officer than it expected. Its current CFO, Blake Jorgensen (pictured) is still leaving, as the company announced Feb. 26 when he became one of the first casualties of the house cleaning done by the Internet company’s new chief executive Carol Bartz. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have an employee who may be contemplating leaving, is promising him more in severance should that happen the most effective way to deal with the situation? That appears to be what happened last week when eHealth, the Mountain View online life insurance provider, reached a “retention” agreement with its chief executive, Gary Lauer.

When he was first hired in 1999, Lauer’s termination benefits called for Read the rest of this entry »

Altera, the San Jose maker of analog chips, announced today that it will incur about $6 million in restructuring-related charges, including $3.5 million in employee termination payments connected with the cutting of 33 positions, or a little over 1 percent of its work force. The per-job-cut rate for those terminations works out to $106,061 each.

Charges related to the termination of Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to the $3.5 million signing bonus Dell gave Ron Garriques when he was hired to be president of its global consumer group in February 2007, the computer maker also agreed to give him a restricted stock grant every year that was to be worth six times his annual base salary of $700,000 every year through fiscal 2012. It also promised him $3 million in cash that was to be paid out in three equal payments over three years from his original hire date.

Just over two years into his employment, he and the company entered into a “Retention Bonus, Merger and Modification Agreement” that gives him $2 million outright in exchange for Read the rest of this entry »

Seagate Technology is set to pay $2.5 million any day now to the chief executive it fired last month, according to the terms of his “separation and release” agreement the company filed Tuesday with the SEC as an amendment to its quarterly financials.

The money is to be paid to him with ten Read the rest of this entry »

Hansen Medical sweetened its severance agreements with several top executives last week as part of its efforts to retain them. That’s right, in order to keep them around, Hansen increased how much cash it would pay “in the  event of a covered termination of employment”, lengthened the period after their termination during which it would pay for their COBRA medical benefits and significantly increased the accelerated vesting of their equity.

Under its previous agreement with its top brass, Hansen Medical agreed to Read the rest of this entry »