Nokia Striving to Prevent MeeGo Brain Drain

Nokia is trying to make sure MeeGo developers do not leave the company by offering them a hefty bonus, according to the online newspaper Taloussanomat. The company’s aim is to entice the programmers into staying until the first MeeGo smart phone hits the market.

Information available to Taloussanomat indicates that Nokia will offer its MeeGo developers a 50 percent bonus. Nokia’s offer allegedly encompasses three deadlines: the end of July, the end of September and the end of year. If employees leave before the agreed date, they forfeit the entire bonus.

Nokia has apparently not revealed what would happen to the MeeGo programmers once the smart phone is ready. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has said that MeeGo, developed in cooperation with Intel, will become mainly a research project in the future.

Earlier, Nokia stated that one high-end MeeGo-based phone will come out this year. It is supposedly to be called N950.

MeeGo has been a smart phone platform in development at Nokia along with Symbian, which is now to be replaced as Nokia’s main operational system with Microsoft’s Windows Phone. It has been predicted that the recent partnership with Microsoft signals layoffs for thousands of Nokia employees.

Even though Nokia has made no decision to stop MeeGo development completely, some MeeGo programmers have already begun looking for jobs elsewhere. Taloussanomat reports that Intel and Google, for example, would gladly employ Nokia experts.