Apple has given some of its engineers big stock bonuses ranging from $50,000 to $180,000 in an effort to stave off splits toward its competitors, specifically Meta.
The group includes those who work in silicon design, hardware, software suite and select processes, according to Bloomberg.
Several of the engineers received roughly $80,000, $100,000 or $120,000 in stock, people familiar with the matter told news outlets.
Bloomberg says the shares have a maturity of more than four years, which provides an incentive to stay at Apple, and has been awarded to those who are high performing at work.
It is also rumored that the company owned by Mark Zuckerberg is developing its own smartwatch. Meta has hired about 100 Apple engineers in the past few months, but Apple has taken its share of key employees from the social media giant.
The latest was Meta’s head of public relations, Andrea Schubert, according to Mark Gorman’s Power On newsletter.
“Meta has been, with Oculus, the market leader in headphones, so such a lease makes sense as Apple approaches their launch,” Gorman wrote.
However, not all Apple engineers received the bonuses, and those who were excluded said the “selection process was arbitrary”, according to Bloomberg.
According to people familiar with the matter, this type of compensation is very rare at Apple, where employees usually receive a base salary, inventory units and a cash bonus.
Sources told Bloomberg that it was an “atypical and surprisingly timed” bonus awarded to about 10-20% of engineers in the appropriate departments.
Apple appears to be not paying enough attention to the retail employees who staged a company-wide strike on Christmas Eve, demanding better wages, paid sick leave, mental health care and better protection for employees in the store.
Those retail employees also demanded N95 masks for all workers, sanitizing stations, appointments for consumers looking to shop inside an Apple Store, and a ban on loitering indoors to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.
Yannick Parrish, a former Apple employee, admitted that the number of participants in the strike was only a small percentage of the company’s workforce of 80,000 people.