Apple offering engineers $180,000 bonuses to prevent poaching
Apple's top engineering talents are being offered significant stock bonuses worth up to $180,000 to prevent defection to Meta and others.
Apple giving large bonuses to prevent poaching
An employee poaching war is seemingly underway between Apple and Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. Compensation raises and bonuses are being used to convince top talent to stick around or jump ship by both companies.
In a report published by Bloomberg on Tuesday, Apple's bonus offering is not only said to be unusually large, but it's also out of season for the company. Anonymous employees shared that between 10% and 20% of engineers had been approached with the bonuses.
The seemingly random selection and large sums have irked some employees. Numbers shared range from $50,000 to $180,000 in restricted stock, set to vest over four years.
The bonuses seem to be a reaction to Meta's recent poaching of key engineers across AR, VR, wearables, and other divisions at Apple. Bloomberg says that Meta has hired about 100 engineers "in the last few months" in this ongoing talent war.
Apple has also been fighting to hire talent from other companies as well. It recently allegedly poached the Meta AR communications chief Andrea Schubert.
The internal politics within Apple continue to bubble to the surface as employees complain of unfair working conditions, fight against returning to the office, and battle issues related to the pandemic. A different round of bonuses was recently offered to retail employees as well.
Read on AppleInsider
Apple giving large bonuses to prevent poaching
An employee poaching war is seemingly underway between Apple and Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. Compensation raises and bonuses are being used to convince top talent to stick around or jump ship by both companies.
In a report published by Bloomberg on Tuesday, Apple's bonus offering is not only said to be unusually large, but it's also out of season for the company. Anonymous employees shared that between 10% and 20% of engineers had been approached with the bonuses.
The seemingly random selection and large sums have irked some employees. Numbers shared range from $50,000 to $180,000 in restricted stock, set to vest over four years.
The bonuses seem to be a reaction to Meta's recent poaching of key engineers across AR, VR, wearables, and other divisions at Apple. Bloomberg says that Meta has hired about 100 engineers "in the last few months" in this ongoing talent war.
Apple has also been fighting to hire talent from other companies as well. It recently allegedly poached the Meta AR communications chief Andrea Schubert.
The internal politics within Apple continue to bubble to the surface as employees complain of unfair working conditions, fight against returning to the office, and battle issues related to the pandemic. A different round of bonuses was recently offered to retail employees as well.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Calm down author. Apple staffers didn’t swear their allegiance to a Apple flag. They are free to take advantage of the job market and are not traitors for doing so.
I've had the opportunity to work alongside some (non-engineering) people at Meta, both employees and contractors... can't say I have any earth-shaking inside scoops but I did glean two facts: the culture seems to be insanely competitive, even for a SV behemoth (think Jack Welch's GE or Microsoft's now-discarded 'forced curve/stacking system') and also the company is very tight-fisted.
I guess it varies from engineer to engineer, but as an engineer I've never been motivated to make a move based on financial reasons. There are too many working hours in the day and too many working days in the year to show up for the slog just for the money. However, I'm sure there is a financial threshold where the "love of the job" is too far out of whack with the compensation provided and the "love of the job" decays in resentment. Of course every employer of talent wants to know exactly what that threshold is for everyone on staff.
At least at a philosophical level, throwing massive amounts of cash at someone who is already above their threshold and still "loving their job" is going to elevate or inflate everyone's threshold, even the slackers, which seems like a rather stupid move by the employer. On a practical level, who doesn't like more cash in their pocket? The smarter ones will dump all that extra into their portfolio and probably leverage it to retire a couple or few years earlier than planned, which may come back to haunt the employer in the long run. Too bad for them. Happy retirement or second career for the engineers.
A company wants you to work as hard as possible, make them as much money, for as little as possible.
A worker wants to do the least amount to get as much money as possible.
Everything else is window dressing.
Here’s how I would play it:
Print out the offer letter, along with other offers you have let go.
Have a one on one with my boss, and give them the letter, and let them know how much you enjoy the challenge of working there, and the other company, and let them know that the other company keeps pestering you about jumping ship.
Offer to accept 2 RSU stock grants that vests in 4 years in both my 401(k) and available to me, but ask that it be a cliff vesting, that if I leave the company for any reason they choose, I immediately vest, and if I leave, I get nothing until vested. (Win-win). Also, have stock options that vest over 4 years at 25% per year, with the strike price at the current level. (These are cheaper than offering stock, and give flexibility to me, and encourage me to do things that raise the price of the stock.)
Negotiating from a position of strength is how it’s done, and it doesn’t have to be adversarial. It’s just that you have a choice to make, and helping the current team know that I am willing to give them a fair chance to counter the offer on the table, especially if I had been approached before, is a nice gesture.
As a note, my wife talks with people in HR at a lot of companies, and skilled employees are difficult to find, so it’s nice to be wanted, and even nicer to let the company that you’re working for know that you like working there.