Rare step: Apple awards large bonus payments to retain staff | News

Retaining employees through generous salaries or bonus payments is nothing unusual in Silicon Valley. For Apple, however, it is, because the company is considered rather stingy in this regard. Especially in the current AI arms race, there is reportedly an unwillingness to match the salary levels of other providers – which is one of the reasons why so many high-profile developers have left Apple in recent months. According to Bloomberg, however, there is one division of the company whose employees are determined to retain – many members of Apple’s “iPhone Product Design” team received unscheduled bonuses amounting to several hundred thousand dollars.

Share packages if you stay for four years
The remuneration is to be in the form of so-called restricted stock units, which are due staggered over four years. The background is the concern that OpenAI and other AI start-ups will continue to specifically poach Apple engineers. The RSUs in question are promises to obtain a certain number of shares at a later date. The securities are only actually credited after the respective deadlines have been reached. Such packages are intended to bind employees in the long term, because an early change often means that some of the shares that have not yet been transferred expire.

Up to $400,000 per employee
According to Bloomberg, the share packages are usually between $200,000 and $400,000, but if Apple shares perform well, they could be worth even more in the coming years. Apple last made similar promises five years ago. During the Corona pandemic, there were stock bonuses of between $50,000 and $180,000, which primarily served to make it more difficult for Meta to poach people. However, the amount now mentioned of up to $400,000 is an amount that the company has never offered to a large number of employees to date. This shows that Apple attaches particularly high value to a strategically important team and takes the risk of poaching seriously.