New Delhi: With Meta (formerly Facebook) betting big on Metaverse, it now is poaching employees from Apple and Microsoft to join it. As many as 100 staffers of Microsoft have ditched the company to join Facebook parent Meta. These people belonged to the team developing Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality headsets, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal.
Competitors have been snapping up people with experience developing Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality headsets, sometimes offering to double their salaries, said former Microsoft employees. The Microsoft augmented-reality group employs around 1,500 people, they said, the WSJ report added.
A similar pattern was seen in Apple employees that quit to join Meta after which the iPhone maker started counteracting to retain its workforce. According to a previous report by news agency Bloomberg, Apple had issued unusual and significant stock bonuses to some engineers, in a bid to retain talent and to stave off defections to rival Facebook parent Meta.
Apple decided to introduce lucrative stock options and bonuses in an attempt to retain its employees and the bonuses came as a surprise to those who received them. The bonuses ranged between $50,000 to $180,000 in some cases. Many of the engineers received amounts of roughly $80,000, $100,000 or $120,000 in shares, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the program isn’t public. The perk was presented by managers as a reward for high performers, the Bloomberg report added.
All the tech giants, including Microsoft, Meta are getting serious about Metaverse. Considered to bring the Internet to life, or at least rendered in 3D, Mark Zuckerberg has defined metaverse as a "virtual environment” where you can go inside of -- instead of just looking at on a screen.