Nokia offers 50% bonus to MeeGo Developers if they stay until years end to deliver Nokia N950

Finnish site taloussanomat.fi, ranked 19 in Finland by Alexa has posted that Nokia is trying to stop the loss of their MeeGo developers by offering them a 50% bonus of their entire salary starting from March if they stay until the years end to deliver the Nokia N950 – Nokia’s first (maybe last) MeeGo phone. Although the N950 is a successor to the N900, it is NOT the espected mass market device we were all hoping for. Instead, Nokia has labelled it as yet another, development platform of which N900 owners rightly fear will be another device that lacks support from Nokia. Such a shame given Maemo 5’s potential.

Frankly, I cannot blame Nokia’s MeeGo developers for jumping ship. Not just because of the shift to primarily focus on Windows Phone but because Nokia has been so utterly unclear what will happen to MeeGo.

MeeGo was considered by some to be the “saviour” of Nokia, one that would battle Android and Apple at the high end whilst Symbian was pushed to the low-mid range handsets. Then as you know, as taloussanomat.fi puts it, they were pretty much just sent to exile on Feb 11. In Finland alone 13,000 people work at Nokia of which half are working on Symbian and MeeGo. Some of that talent has moved to Intel/Google’s greenerbot pastures.

As the comments in the article said, those smart enough would probably moved/in process of moving already. Think ahead. One year of extra bonus – what happens next year? Do you still have a job? I’m only basing this on the limited information provided. I don’t know if these people are contracted for longer periods and so may have more reason to stay, perhaps to be moved around the company and work at different departments.

With Microsoft at the helm of primary OS development, there is no shortage of developers there. But that doesn’t lessen the importance of Nokia having it’s own base of talented minds.

taloussanomat.fi, cheers Tim.

Category: Rant