Looking for new career opportunities in management? You might try AMD. The big chipmaker just whacked three of its top executives: the General Manager of Computing & Graphics, John Byrne; Chief Marketing Officer, Colette LaForce; and Chief Strategy Officer, Raj Naik. That’s three immediate vacancies in Mahogany Row.
The company isn’t entirely decimated. The heads of HR, Legal, and Operations are still there. And the CTO (Mark Papermaster) and CFO (Devinder Kumar) just got retention bonuses, in the form of new incentive stock options that vest in a couple of years. Issuing them bonuses while their colleagues walked out the door suggests that Papermaster and/or Kumar might have been a bit loose in the saddle, too, and AMD CEO Lisa Su wanted to make sure they stayed put.
The departures came immediately after the last day of CES in Las Vegas, usually a sign that the partings were fairly amicable. If you’d wanted to torpedo your former empoyer on the way out the door, there’s no better way than to quit in the middle of a big trade show. That the announcements came afterwards shows that everyone behaved professionally.
