Having Rich Beyer taking over as CEO of Freescale, could be good news for Freescale's IC designers. Beyer has a record of liking designers and rewarding them well.
"At Elantec, where I was CEO, I was the fifth highest paid guy in the company. The top four guys were all design engineers," Beyer told me when he was CEO of Intersil, "we have special incentive programmes for design engineers. As they develop products that are successful they benefit from that success. As products go into the marketplace they can achieve significant bonuses."
How much is significant? "Our design engineers get bonus cheques every quarter," replied Beyer. "Some get over $100,000 per quarter in a bonus cheque." Which is a nice addition to a basic salary which is typically around the $150,000 mark.
Beyer sees the importance of keeping these guys happy as fundamental to a company's progress. "Our growth is constrained by our ability to recruit designers," said Beyer.
Beyer is a good bloke. Blackstone have shown a lot of savvy in getting him on board. Many people would assume that taking on Beyer means that Blackstone is set on running Freescale as a proper business, i.e. for long-term sales and profit growth, rather than splitting it up to try and get some of its money back.
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