Some Apple Engineers Rewarded Up to $180K in Stock Bonuses as Incentive to Stay

[4tune8chance]

I also can assert that this is true in the midwest to the Eastern seaboard of the US. And if those "interesting problems" dry up, or WORSE YET, corporate bureaucracy results in only lip service to the issues? Oooh man, the best, most qualified team members will be the first ones to leave their job for another.

If they start to think that their old job isn't giving them the support they need in order to be successful, that's the fire alarm right there, but it is often missed by management. It's almost never about the salary, yet a lot of managers will fall back to the old tried-to-death method of trying to keep somebody on board by offering them more money.

Employees don't leave if one of these things below is present. But the more things here that they have to deal with, the faster that they will be worn down and the quicker they may decide to retire or leave for greener pastures.

• Needless rules and process hell for filling out forms and stuff. Sure, everybody expects some annoyances. But if it's always painful and slow, that's not an incentive to stay.
• Crazy waiting periods for simple stuff like a green light on a project, procuring software or hardware, or getting security access approvals.
• Making it difficult to get training or OTJ experience, like not allowing or helping to pay for a training course once or twice each year. Also, keeping the employee 100% allocated with work will leave zero time for personal development. They see that and will lose heart over time if they feel like they're always busting their knuckles and not having time to train.
• Not sticking up for employees when working with upper management, and/or not acknowledging good work from employees when talking to upper management. They don't need to be in the conversation in order to see right through your BS reasons for not doing it.
• Taking too long to hire replacement staff or to hire for growth.
• Endless company or management reorganizations (with and without layoffs) can make a company appear "not in control" or somehow not stable for the future.

All of these things and more can and will result in people leaving.

Agreed. As a technician I loved fixing stuff, and if the opportunities arose join the engineering teams to innovate and solve problems. The next level was actual experiments to prove concepts, great times, playing at scientist. Which just confirms that no matter your education level, if at hart your scientific, a job that lets you participate in problem solving is very rewarding and just as important as cash.

 

[BeanieMan]

I've hired engineers in the Bay Area and this is actually common among the seniors I met. As long as the cash compensation is above a certain level, the most important thing becomes working on interesting problems.

Also, the cash portion of compensation often maxes out $150-200k a year. The rest comes in the form of ISOs, RSUs, and cash bonuses. This is actually the salary policy at one of the major cloud providers: everyone maxes out salary in this range, including the executives, and the bulk is in equity that vests over time.

Since some commenters don't appear to be familiar with vesting schedules: the standard vesting schedule in SV is 4 years with a 1 year cliff, which means you get 25% after one year then the balance vests monthly for the remainder. Some big companies have tried to push to 5 years, though I'm not sure how well that would work in the current market. Crypto companies seem to be headed in the opposite direction: 3 years with a 6 month cliff.

Interesting where vesting schedules are going - the linear 4 years with the 1yr cliff seems to be going away a lot of places. I think Amazon used to be back-loaded - i.e. small vests earlier, larger vests later, to keep people around longer. The one year cliff is basically the same idea - keep them at least a year. However, i know of several going to like 6 week cliff - essentially immediate vesting (i think Google is like this), and even front-loading the vesting schedule. E.g., i think Uber is like 35,30,20,15 percent vests for the 4 years of the first grant, with refreshes every year. (i'm probably a little off on the exact numbers.)