Apple is rewarding engineers up to $180K bonuses to keep them from going to Meta

Back in November, Facebook officially changed its name to Meta in order to better separate the titular social media platform from the company's other technological projects. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg stated the company will focus on the metaverse and connecting people, thus the name. At this time, it was also revealed that Reality Labs, which runs the company's VR/AR projects is separating to be a more distinct entity. As such, Meta has been working on acquiring new talent and has even poached Apple employees from the augmented reality, artificial intelligence, software, and hardware engineering divisions. It's worth noting that Apple has been doing the same of Meta employees.

According to Bloomberg, Meta has hired about 100 engineers from Apple in the last few months. In a surprise incentive to keep engineers from leaving, Apple has recently rewarded bonuses from $50,000 to $180,000 to its high performers.

The payouts aren't part of normal Apple compensation packages, which include a base salary, stock units and a cash bonus. Apple sometimes awards additional cash bonuses to employees, but the size of the latest stock grants were atypical and surprisingly timed, the people said. They were given to about 10% to 20% of engineers in applicable divisions.

This is a big deal and rather out of the ordinary for the tech giant as this is not something Apple has really done in the past. But not everyone walked away happy. In fact, some engineers who didn't receive bonuses are rather upset at not being included.

A competitive rivalry between Meta and Apple will likely continue to grow over the coming months and years as the two companies battle for the market lead in areas like smartwatches, AR/VR, and other technologies.