Apparently, Apple engineers get paid less than their Silicon Valley peers. Some are speculating that Apple will need to cough up more cash or face a rash of defections.
I doubt it.
For one thing, Apple's engineers also get stock. Have you noticed the stock price lately? There's more than one way to get paid.
There's also the Apple mystique. No, it doesn't put granola on the table but it counts for something. As Fabrizio Capobianco, my friend and Funambol's CEO, often tells me, Juventus can get top-notch players for less because many of the best soccer players want to play for Juventus at any price.
Lastly, where are these developers going to go? We have a looming recession on our hands. I doubt the employment market is going to see considerable froth in the near term. A safe job at a successful company probably looks more appealing today than a job with an uber-cool start-up that may not pay the bills a year from now.
In sum, Apple has time to figure this out and may not need to do anything.
Yahoo President Sue Decker saw her salary, bonus, and incentive play payment increase from $1.35 million in 2006 to $1.76 million in 2007, but factoring in stock and options, her overall compensation declined, the company said in regulatory filing Tuesday.
Susan Decker
(Credit: Yahoo)Decker's stock and stock option compensation, as valued by Yahoo, dropped from $14.6 million in 2006 to $13 million in 2007, the company said.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang, who took over the top executive post from Terry Semel in June, got a $1 salary and no stock or new options. That figure is unchanged from the year earlier, Yahoo said.
The company also said Semel exercised stock options worth $37.8 million in 2007. Semel left Yahoo's board on January 31, the day before .
Want to make more money as an enterprise application developer? You're in luck--if you know open source.
According to a recent report from Bluewolf Consulting, enterprises increasingly deploy open-source software, and look to specialized application development on top of it, to drive business value:
The rise of open-source software in application development puts developers with a specialization in those technologies in a position to ask for a 30 (percent) or 40 percent pay increase, Kirven says. "We've gotten more requests from our permanent-placement division for open-source developers in the last six months than in the last five or six years combined," he says. "It's not as easy as getting free software; someone has to get it up and running. LAMP is everywhere now--these types of technologies no one heard of 18 months ago are all the sudden becoming a hot commodity."
Indeed. Not only does open source bring developers more money, but it also apparently brings them more satisfaction.
Jon Williams, chief technology officer of test preparation company Kaplan, made it very clear in an Infoworld podcast I recorded a month ago that open source is one of his best retention tools.
Let people do interesting work, and they stick around. Make them mindlessly monitor that Windows machine, and they'll bolt.
Update: It is also worth reading about how open source drives enterprise innovation.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the highest paid chief executive in America for 2006, according to a list released by Forbes on Thursday.
Jobs only draws a dollar a year in salary, which puts him behind practically the entire employment base of the country in that category. But his stock compensation isn't bad. Jobs also owns Apple stock valued at $646.6 million last year, twice as much as the second-highest paid CEO on the list, Occidental Petroleum's Ray Irani. (Somewhere, there's a joke about an oil executive named Irani, but anyway.)
It certainly was a good year for both the oil industry and Apple. Apple reported soaring profits and shipments of both Macs and iPods, and unveiled the iPhone before the usual adoring crowd at Macworld. Forbes ranked Jobs at 36 in terms of efficiency, its term for evaluating performance measured against pay.
Fellow tech executives Terry Semel and Michael Dell joined Jobs in the top 10 highest paid CEOs in the U.S., at the fifth and sixth rankings, respectively. Neither ranked very high in the efficiency column, however, as the past year wasn't easy for either executive. Dell actually had to replace his former CEO, Kevin Rollins, amid a yearlong slide punctuated by an accounting investigation.
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