A gift with conditions.. Apple offers rewards to its employees of up to 180 thousand dollars

Apple offered some of its engineers big stock bonuses ranging from $50,000 to $180,000 in an attempt to prevent them from heading towards its competitors, specifically Meta.

Last week, according to a Bloomberg report, the company gave some engineers in its silicon design, hardware, software suite selection, and process groups bonuses outside known regulations, which are issued as private equity, according to people familiar with the matter.

The shares mature after 4 years, providing an incentive to stay with the iPhone maker.

Many engineers received roughly $80,000, $100,000, or $120,000 in stock.

Rumors have recently emerged that Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, is developing its own smartwatch.

It has hired about 100 Apple engineers in the past few months, so Apple decided to secure key employees from the social media giant.

The latest to join Meta was public relations chief Andrea Schubert, according to the Power On newsletter, run by Mark Gorman.

"It was dead, with Oculus, the market leader in headphones, so such action makes sense as Apple approaches the launch of its new glasses," Gorman wrote.

However, not all Apple engineers received the bonuses, and those who were excluded said the "selection process is arbitrary," according to Bloomberg.

According to people familiar with the matter, this type of bonus is very rare at Apple, where employees usually receive a base salary and a cash bonus.

Sources told Bloomberg that it was an "atypical and amazingly 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 the distribution of masks to all workers and sanitizing stations and to consumers looking to shop inside the Apple Store, and a ban on loitering inside the buildings to help mitigate the spread of the Corona virus.

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.