Editor: Some Things about the Internet (imyixieshi)
Source: Alphabet (ID: wujicaijing)
Author: Liu Xingzhi, Editor: Zhao Jinjie
"Some things about the Internet" has been authorized, please contact the original author for reprinting
Even Apple, whose market value has reached three trillion US dollars, under the poaching of companies such as Tesla and Meta, has begun to worry about how to retain employees, and even has to launch "banknote capabilities".
According to Bloomberg, in order to retain key employees, Apple has recently issued huge bonuses in the form of stocks to some engineers in chip design, hardware, some software and operations.
About 10 to 20 percent of the engineers in their departments receive awards, most of whom receive stocks worth between $50,000 and $180,000. But it's worth noting that the stock has a four-year restriction period, and the premise of cashing out is that these employees stay at Apple.
It's a windfall for the engineer who receives the reward: the reward isn't part of a regular paycheck. People familiar with the matter said that Apple usually issues additional cash rewards, but stock rewards of this size are rare.
While Apple explained to the outside world that the benefit is a reward for employees who perform well, the reward of such a rare scale, combined with a four-year restriction period, is clearly a defensive measure to prevent competitors like Meta from digging into the wall.
With the metacosmonic concept on fire, Apple is in a race for talent with tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, especially Meta, which are fiercely competing in AR/VR devices and smartwatches.
In the past few months, the two companies have competed for talent: Meta poached about 100 engineers from Apple, and Apple poached several core Meta employees, including Andre Schubert, head of communications at Meta AR.
In fact, with each new wave of technology, the Silicon Valley giants will wave their talent hoes at Apple. After the rise of the electric car boom, a talent war broke out between Apple and Tesla, with the two sides poaching each other's employees.
Tesla eventually became the winner of this battle for talent. Musk said in a 2015 interview that Tesla poached five times as many Apple employees as Apple poached Tesla employees. "The people they hired were fired by us. We often joke that Apple is Tesla's graveyard. If you can't do it at Tesla, you'll have to go to Apple, and that's no joke. Musk said.
1
Behind several famous talent battles in Apple's history, there are founder Jobs, and the initiator of digging apple walls is Jobs himself.
On September 17, 1985, Jobs was kicked out of the Apple company he founded due to the failure of the "Lisa" computer project.
Until September 17, Jobs, although nominally chairman of the company, had long since lost real power, and the company was controlled by former PepsiCo president John Sculley.
On September 13, Jobs, who had not appeared at any meeting for a long time, unusually asked to attend a board meeting. At the meeting, Jobs announced that he would resign as chairman of Apple, start a new company, and take away "a small number of non-key employees."
On the morning of September 14, Jobs wrote an official letter informing Sculley of the names of the five employees he was going to take.
"Steve, these are not low-level employees." Sculley said after reading the letter. But Jobs replied: "These employees will resign sooner or later, and they will submit their resignation letters by 9 a.m. this morning." ”
Jobs
From Jobs's perspective, he was honest, and the five employees were not department managers or top members. In fact, they feel that the restructuring of the company has weakened their power.
But in Sculley's view, the five people on the list are senior employees, key figures for Apple to open up the market, and they know some of the company's plans. Although these plans have been shelved as Jobs lost real power, they remain a company secret. In the eyes of Sculley and the board, from Jobs's speech at the board meeting to the collective resignation of five employees, it was an elaborate betrayal.
Some Apple executives recalled that Jobs secretly recruited a group of top managers before leaving, taking them away. "You can't do things like this, it's very vulgar."
A few days later, the two sides still failed to reach an agreement, and Sculley and the board decided to sue Jobs for "breach of fiduciary duties", including secretly planning to build a new company to compete with Apple, secretly plotting his new company to use Apple's plan to design and develop a new generation of products, and secretly poaching key Apple employees. Since then, the two sides have clashed several times in the media.
2
For Jobs, 1996 was an important year. That year, Apple acquired Jobs' company, NeXT, allowing Jobs to return to Apple.
In January 1997, Jobs rejoined Apple. Although he joined as an informal part-time consultant, he became involved in some company personnel issues as soon as he took office. It is widely believed that it is only a matter of time before Jobs returns to the helm of Apple.
Eight months later, Apple CEO Gil Amelio left and Fred Anderson took over as interim CEO. Anderson made it clear that "he would work under Jobs's guidance." In this way, Jobs took over apple's baton again.
After his return, Jobs was involved in all aspects of the company's business and held a series of meetings. After solving the business problem, he also believed that it was necessary to stop the loss of apple's top employees.
In the past decade, Apple's performance has continued to decline, the stock price has fallen too much, the options have become meaningless, and as a result, people have repeatedly chosen to jump off Apple's ship, which looks like it is about to sink.
Therefore, Jobs decided to reprice the options in the hands of senior employees, increase the value of employees' options by reducing the exercise price, stabilize the military's morale, and retain employees.
After returning to Apple, Jobs led Apple to develop a series of epoch-making products: the color Mac was released in 1997, the iPod was released in 2001, and Apple re-emerged.
In 2005, Jobs unveiled the iPod MP3, which was the best-selling portable player of its time.
But the problem of the loss of key employees still plagues Jobs. Apple fueled a renaissance of the tech economy after the dot-com bubble burst, but the development of social networks attracted the curiosity of talented young employees.
The renaissance of the tech industry has led to a surge in demand for talent in Silicon Valley, with giants targeting hoes at rivals.
Google is Apple's most feared adversary. In February 2005, Jobs twice emailed Google founder Sergey Brin accusing Google of trying to poach Apple Safari team members and saying that digging up walls meant war. After receiving the email, Brin immediately informed the relevant personnel to stop the operation of digging people from Apple.
Later, Bill Campbell, who was also a director of Apple and a consultant to Google at the time, sent a letter to Jobs, saying that Schmidt, CEO and director of Apple, personally agreed to the "mutual non-digging" agreement with Apple.
Jobs, who received the news, immediately sent an email to Bruce, then-Adobe CEO, to inform him of the matter. Subsequent developments prove that Adobe has also signed a similar "gentleman's agreement" with Apple.
3
The Silicon Valley giants were able to reach an agreement, in part because they faced competition from new powers. For example, after the rise of social media, Facebook looked at Apple and Google's employees as a common rival of the two companies.
Silicon Valley bigwigs, on the other hand, have deep or shallow ties to each other. Google co-founder Sergey Brin saw Jobs as a spiritual mentor when Google CEO Schmidt himself was also a director of Apple. The agreement can be reached without the big guys matchmaking.
While not legal, similar secret protocols were widely popular among tech companies from 2005 to 2009 until 2010.
It is impossible for such a wide-ranging agreement not to leak out, and in 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice took note of it.
After antitrust investigations, on September 24, 2010, apple, Google, Adobe, Intel and other six companies reached a new agreement, agreeing to no longer restrict each other's poaching of employees.
In 2011, 64,000 employees of the companies who learned of the damages launched a class-action lawsuit against the giants for driving down wages in the tech industry through secret agreements and claiming $3 billion.
After four years, the case ended in an out-of-court settlement in September 2015, with 64,000 employees receiving only $415 million in damages, excluding $40 million in legal fees, an average of only about $5,800 per person. For tech giant employees who generally make more than $100,000 a year, the symbolism of the compensation goes beyond the compensation itself.
The collapse of the agreement, on the one hand, has legal factors, and the collusion of giants with each other is itself illegal. At the time of the Gentleman's Agreement, Schmidt deliberately stressed his reluctance to leave paper documents in case he would be prosecuted in the future.
On the other hand, the original purpose of the agreement was to stabilize the company's management, key employees, and work together to drive down wages in the tech industry. But with the rise of new tech companies, it's neither realistic nor meaningful to try to drive down wages across the industry with a few verbal agreements alone. According to the case file, four companies, including Apple and Google, tried to woo Facebook into the agreement, but were rejected.
In 2010, the giants agreed to abolish the mutual non-poaching agreement, and the following year, the initiator of the agreement, Steve Jobs, died, and the "secret struggle" of the talent competition of the technology giants ended, and Cook, who took over Jobs, began a career of "open competition" with other giants.
It is worth noting that Cook, who was called "the best employee so far" by Jobs, joined Apple from a digging hole.
Cook
Apple in early 1998, iMac, iPod and other epoch-making products have not yet been released, the company is in danger, competitor Compaq is already the world's largest seller of personal computers. Cook has just transferred from IBM for 12 years to Compaq for 6 months, with bright performance and bright future, and Apple recruiters have repeatedly communicated with Cook but Cook has refused.
But then Cook felt that he should meet with Jobs, and this seemingly ordinary meeting changed Cook's fate. "I just wanted to meet him, but all of a sudden he started talking about his strategy and vision." Cook recalled, "After no more than 5 minutes of interviews with Jobs, I dropped my caution and rationality and joined Apple. ”
Interestingly, during the time when Jobs's health was deteriorating and the successor was uncertain, many companies had tried to contact Cook, in addition to IT companies, general motors, Renault and other established giants had the idea of poaching Cook.
On August 24, 2011, the news of Cook's appointment as CEO of Apple shook the world, and the next day, his name made headlines in the media — he received a huge amount of certified equity. The CEO position, combined with a huge stake in certifications, established Cook's position at Apple and discouraged other companies from poaching.
4
In the post-Jobs era, under the operational genius Cook, Apple further grew into a technology giant integrating consumer electronics, computer software, and online services.
In August 2018, Apple became the first listed company with a market value of more than $3 trillion; in August 2020, Apple became the first listed company with a market value of more than $2 trillion; on January 4, 2021, Apple's stock rose sharply intraday, with a market value of more than $3 trillion.
Apple, which is becoming more powerful, is also becoming more and more attractive to external companies. Every time the technology industry comes, Apple has become the focus of poaching.
The field of electric vehicles, which has risen in recent years, is the hardest hit area of Apple's brain drain. In this area, Apple has even become a "talent pool" for competitors.
In 2015, Tesla poached a large number of employees from Apple, and Apple still used color, but with little success. There is news that at that time, Apple offered up to $250,000 in signing bonuses and 60% salary increases to attract Tesla employees, but Tesla employees did not buy it, musk said that Tesla poached 5 times the number of Apple employees that Apple poached.
Musk
In January 2017, Chris Ratner, the "father of the Swift programming language" who worked at Apple for 11 years, joined Tesla; a month ago, Matt Kathport, senior design director of Apple's Mac, who had been responsible for the development of the Touch bar version of the MacBook Pro, also jumped to Tesla.
Traditional car company Ford also extended its hoe to Apple, and in September 2021, Ford poached Doug Field, Apple's automotive project director.
Field's experience is quite enriching. Field joined Apple in 2008 and served as vice president of Mac hardware engineering in 2011; in 2013, he left Apple to join Terrass as Tesla's chief automotive engineer, overseeing the development of the Model 3; and in 2018, he returned to Apple to actually take charge of the driverless electric vehicle project.
Without the restrictions of the "Gentleman's Agreement", Cook has no way to deal with this "left-right jump" behavior.
This is true not only of electric cars, but also of the hot metacosm. In the past few months, about 100 Apple engineers have been poached by Meta to follow Zuckerberg into the metaverse.
Whether it is a battle between the open and the dark, the talent war in Silicon Valley will not stop; no matter who Musk and Zuckerberg's vision is more representative of the future of technology, there is a credit behind this.
Resources:
"Silicon Valley Giants collude with each other's arrogance" Business Week
"6 technology companies such as Google and Apple in the United States no longer restrict each other's poaching" China News Network
The Biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, CITIC Press
The Battle for Talent in Silicon Valley Heats Up! In order to prevent being "dug into the wall", Apple pays a high stock dividend to employees" Guangming Network
"The United States cancels the non-compete clause Silicon Valley giants fear to fall back into a vicious circle of poaching", IT Times Magazine
Cook: Apple's Post-Jobs Era Cold Lake
END