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Apple gives top engineers bonuses up of $180k to curtail defections to Meta[..]
- jelliclesfarm 5y ago180k isn’t a whole lot in the Bay Area. But it still got a chuckle out of me because this is Apple!
- nightski 5y agoIs that true? Is it typical for bonuses in the Bay Are to be much higher than 180k?
- compiler-guy 5y agoBonuses for line engineers are rarely that high in the Bay Area--one would have to be pretty senior to get that normally. This is a very high number in raw terms. Also note that not everyone got the high end--180K is the top, not the bottom, and we don't really know what the distribution was. These RSUs vest over four years, so this is a $45k annual bonus (possibly growing with the stock). At somewhat senior levels, the federal and state taxes will eat perhaps 45%, so it is only ("only"!) about $25k extra each year.
- jeffbee 5y agoStandard bonus targets at Google, for example, are 20% of median salary at your grade, so $45k would be the standard bonus for an engineer making $225k (in base salary alone, not total comp) who "meets expectations". This is a pretty common salary level, according to levels.fyi
- compiler-guy 5y agoSo, on the high end at least, this more or less doubles the bonus for a senior engineer doing their job. Real money, perhaps enough to change your mind about leaving, but not life changing. On the low end, more than you had, but also perhaps less persuasive.
- vmception 5y agoThere is a bimodal distribution On one end are the $0-$5000 bonuses where you are just supposed to be happy you got anything On the other end are formalized expectations at much higher amounts and with performance multipliers. The bonuses in the article are on top of that, but is in stock and spread out over 4 years. So their value is 1/4th of whatever is in the headline and that would put them as inline or closer to average.
- grogenaut 5y ago180k/4 years so 45k. To some that's a bonus, for many in the valley that's just typical yearly stock fluctuation's impact on your compensation. It depends on what the rest of their comp is. It also depends on how totally underpaid some of them may be. Tossing made up numbers, if this takes them from 500 to 545, great but smaller rate than 100-145. However if they're highly valued and only making 145 something else is wrong.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoNever mind, even if you got the $180K in one lump sum it would not quite cover the downpayment on a home in the Bay Area.
- almost_usual 5y agoHalf of it would probably go to income tax anyway.
- hpagey 5y agotypical bonuses in bay area are percentage of salaries. Varies between 10% to 25% of your base. This looks like a retention grant which is also fairly common.
- KaiserPro 5y agoYou have to remember that at least for amazon, facebook and google, most of your wage comes from shares. If you look at level.fyi you'll see that yes bonuses are between 10-25% of your wage, but your wage could make up less than 40% of your total take home money (once shares are taken into account.)
- NaughtyShiba 5y ago180k in stocks, over 4 years.
- varelse 5y agoLame... Zuck can pay them $3M a year if they're really "top" engineers. They should defect. What would be news is giving that kind of bonus RSUs to the rank and file. And oh yes downvote the truth. Can't have Meta's salary ladder getting out there.
- arcticbull 5y agoThat's not Meta's salary ladder. [1] I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, and maybe you're referring to a discretionary equity grant (explicitly not on the ladder) or folks who have been there a long time vesting equity (but that can happen anywhere with equity appreciation - including very much at Apple). Staff engineers at Meta get like $500/yr, and principal engineers something in the $750-$1M range. However, we're talking top 1% of just the engineers at the company. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- varelse 5y agoWe are talking about supposed "top" people who are critical hires here. Such offers go directly to Mark Zuckerberg and he has to approve them personally. And it was $3M in order to beat Google when someone I know got one of those offers but again I will eat all your delicious downvotes because that's not true, that's impossible (tm). You're right about fungibles at each level though. But this article is about top people right?
- endisneigh 5y agoDo you have any proof for your claims?
- ksec 5y agoDupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29717381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29717381
- atlasunshrugged 5y agoWhy would people go to Meta right now? Seems like the FB brand is super toxic; you'd have to pay me a metric shitload to work for a company that's being compared to the modern day tobacco industry
- gfxgirl 5y agono other company has bet their future on VR/AR , at least not publically. If you want to do VR or AR there aren't really many other choices.
- Jansen312 5y agoEveryone has a price....at least I believe that is what Zuck is thinking of. Meta is his goldmine. He needs miners for his Meta goldmine at whatever the price is. If he offer a pay....say worth twice what one can get at Apple, it is worthwhile for some to try their luck in Meta. 10 years wasted in Meta will only be 5 years missing in Apple for example. It still will look good in one resume having been "land developer" or "founding fathers and mothers" in Metaverse.
- compiler-guy 5y agoWord on the street is that Meta is paying big time to overcome the toxic brand. So if you aren't personally too bothered by it all (and some people aren't), then you can rake in the cash. https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire-talent-fears-career-black-mark-2021-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
- steve_adams_86 5y agoThey’re also hiring very aggressively from what I can tell. They have recruiters all over and the path to interviewing is remarkably short. I didn’t bother because I like my job and I suspect their salaries in Canada will be very… Canadian.
- wittycardio 5y agoNo their salaries are quite Californian
- gcampos 5y agoI think this may backfire. It will give the people who received the bonus more leverage to negotiate better comp somewhere else, and will rub the people who didn’t receive it the wrong way, which might be the push some need to start interviewing elsewhere. This strategy could work if the bonus was big enough to outbid most of the competition.
- troutmskreplica 5y agoI don't think they have a choice either way, but you're right, and I have a friend who recently did this, but not between Apple and Meta. He was working at another well-known tech company that is suffering from a brain drain and he was getting a lot of exposure (including in the press). They gave him a seven figure retention bonus in RSUs, and he used that to get around the same from a competitor where he felt he would have better long-term prospects. Overall his yearly expected comp went up by about 50%, and should be around $750k-$900k at this point.
- curiousllama 5y agoIdk about in tech, but often these types of bonuses are (1) highly targeted and (2) come with some sort of agreement to stay. E.g., there's a 5 person team responsible for a critical component. 4 of them leave in the space of 6 months. So management says to the last one "we'll give you $200k at the end of 12 months." That person then leaves in exactly 12 months and a day - which is fine, because they trained the new team on the critical component.
- gcampos 5y agoIn tech the usual way it works is “every year you stay, I give you 25% of the bonus” and because the bonus is in stock, it can actually increase over time. That is why I feel this bonus is not a good idea, $50k/year is not enough comp bump to hold someone in the Bay Area
- renewiltord 5y agoThis is nothing. But in my experience, Apple has a lot of engineers who are not very good, so I’m not going to try to poach them on this count.
- jeffbee 5y ago$180k per 4 years is peanuts for "top engineers". Would expect that as a routine annual bonus for the top half of FAANG engineers (i.e. common "senior" titles and higher).
- arcticbull 5y agoAnnual bonus targets for staff and principal engineers are somewhere between 15% and 25% of their cash base which is somewhere between $200 and $300. So their annual bonus would be between $30K and $75K ordinarily. Senior engineers less. So yeah, double bonus basically.
- jeffbee 5y agoI can see where a guaranteed double bonus for four years is nice, but it doesn't seem to add up to much, competitively speaking. If you are a top-10% engineers, Meta will just pay out whatever you are leaving on the table with respect to RSUs etc plus a handsome signing bonus, just to get you on the team. Also, it just seems small compared to what the overall comp must be at Apple (I've never worked there, just guessing). If they give T5-6 engineers RSU packages worth 1-2 million over 4 years, and given that their share price has tripled in the last 18 months, anyone who has been there long enough to be worth retaining is making a hell of a lot more than $180k by 2026.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cryptica 5y agoI don't work for Apple or Meta but I'm thinking that Apple should pay me to not work for Meta and Meta should pay me to not work for Apple. Everybody wins.
- carlycue 5y agoApple is the most prestigious company to work for on planet earth and they attract the best hardware designers because design and UX is the core of Apple but that comes at a cost: subpar software engineering. Apple as an org isn't structured to deliver top tier, efficient software like Google, Microsoft and Meta and I don't they'll ever will. Just look at iCloud, Apple Music or any of their services. They are all built on inefficient and outdated tech.
- bin_bash 5y agois it really a zero-sum game though? I suppose I can't think of a large company that seems to really nail hardware and software but I feel it should be attainable.
- db65edfc7996 5y ago>FB brand is super toxic I am in the market for a new phone. I had to disqualify my previous top pick because it came pre-loaded with non-uninstallable Facebook. Paranoid? Maybe, but Facebook has been previously demonstrated to do whatever they can to escape a sandbox and capture your data. They likely employ teams who do nothing but look for exploits in IOS/Android. Edit: missed the clutch keyword "non-uninstallable"
- dragonwriter 5y ago> uninstallable Facebook. Do you mean “non-uninstallable Facebook”?
- db65edfc7996 5y agoWhoops, corrected. Thanks.
- alexeiz 5y agoFrankly speaking, $80K-120K of stock grant over 4 years sounds like a joke. Let's say you earn $200K a year. This is about 10% of your salary. If you get more than 10% pay raise by leaving Apple to join Meta, this bonus will not stop you.