Apple is reportedly offering its employees up to $180,000 to retain them and ward off competitors like Meta.
According to Bloomberg, “Apple has issued unusual and significant stock bonuses to some engineers in an effort to retain talent, looking to stave off defections to tech rivals such as Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc.”
Apparently there is a technical talent war raging in Silicon Valley and beyond due to increasing interests and investments in the metaverse, augmented reality, virtual reality and more. In fact Meta has hired about 100 engineers from Apple in the last couple of months and Apple has equally recruited Meta employees too.
So Apple gave bonuses ranging from about $50,000 to as much as $180,000 to some engineers in silicon design, hardware and select software and operations groups. Theses bonuses which were issued as restricted stock units, came as a surprise to most of the employees that received them. They were interestingly presented by managers as a reward for high performers.
These bonuses are not part of normal Apple compensation packages which include a base salary, stock units and a cash bonus. They were given to about 10 – 20% of engineers in applicable divisions and for those engineers that were not given the shares, they were not too happy and they believe the selection process was arbitrary.
A couple of days ago, Apple announced it would be giving employees across the company a $1,000 bonus to help them with their home workspaces and can be used as they see fit.
