Metaverse addresses employees
Earlier, some engineers turned up their noses at Facebook, but since the name change and the unveiling of plans surrounding the metaverse, Meta appears to have a huge appeal. Reality Labs, the department that works on VR and AR projects, has become an independent business unit within Meta and has been busy recruiting new staff. Much of that comes from Apple, especially engineers and employees who worked on augmented reality applications, artificial intelligence, hardware and software. Incidentally, Apple itself also regularly recruits employees from Facebook/Meta. For example, Andrea Schubert recently switched. At Meta she was responsible for communication and PR around augmented reality.
Conversely, around 100 people would have switched from Apple to Meta. The bonuses in stock packages paid to keep them in are said to be between $50,000 and $180,000, Bloomberg reports. The bonuses are not part of the normal compensation, which includes stock and cash bonuses in addition to a base salary. Apple often gives cash bonuses to employees, but the current bonuses are unusual and come at a special time. It would be about 10% to 20% of the engineers who work in the relevant departments.
Apple would never have done this extensively in the past. However, it also produces slanted faces: engineers who do not receive bonuses are not amused that they are apparently not important enough for the company. For decades, Silicon Valley has been plagued by the problem of companies stealing employees from each other. As more and more companies move into augmented and virtual reality, self-driving cars, machine learning and other technologies, the problem is becoming more and more common. For example, Apple has stolen employees from Tesla, but there are also employees who job hop from Tesla to Apple.