

20 Freescale Semiconductor Employees on Missing Flight MH370 - greenburger
http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140308-902237.html

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dm2
That's awful for the people who are dead, their families, and the company.

This brings up an important lesson about minimizing risk that many businesses
should consider. Many companies forbid the upper management from traveling
together in case of a disaster such as this. Maybe the same thinking should
apply to other employees, a limit of 5 - 10 employees traveling together, just
in case the worst happens.

I wonder how this will affect their stock price. They have about 20,000
employees but news like this might scare away investors, we'll see Monday.

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akiselev
In semiconductor companies, that danger is very real. It's a common practice
to license major parts of chips such as the silicon IP for peripherals or even
entire processors so the teams that intimately know the system design of an
entire family of chips can be very small. If the 20 people on the flight were
even half the team working on one of Freescale's products, they could have
just lost six months to a year.

If a startup designing silicon lost that many people, it would probably be
irrecoverable.

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brooksbp
> If the 20 people on the flight were even half the team working on one of
> Freescale's products, they could have just lost six months to a year.

Replacing 20 people even at a company the size of Freescale is not just a
"6-12 month setback." I would pull a much larger time frame out of my ass,
especially if you were to consider the long-term value these employees had.

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diakritikal
This is sad news. I was trying to listen to some cello works and this (the
music) popped into my recommendations. Not a huge Elgar fan but Nimrod and
many of his pieces are very evocative. Hug your partner and children tonight.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE)

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clef
Mmmm people die and you wonder about stock price and investors?

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chad_oliver
Wondering about stock price and investors does not imply that we stop caring
about the people who died. The two actions are independent. Thus, if we
consider the impact of this event, _independent_ of the human impact, it seems
obvious that the effect on business could be quite significant. This doesn't
diminish the human concern; it's just a different topic.

