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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

I have never heard of anyone getting a sign on bonus that was unconditional. When I have had signing bonuses they were owed back prorated if my employment ended for any reason in the first year.

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Are most people that money hungry? I wouldn't expect someone like Zuckerberg to understand, but if I ever got to more than a couple million dollars, I'm never doing anything else for the sake of making more money again.

This is a very weird take. Lots of people want to actively work on things that are interesting to them or impactful to the world. Places like Meta potentially give the opportunity to work on the most impactful and interesting things, potentially in human history.

Setting that aside, even if the work was boring, I would jump at the chance to earn $100M for several years of white collar, cushy work, purely for the impact I could have on the world with that money.

It's not such a weird take from a perspective of someone who's never had quite enough money. If you've never had enough, the dream is having more than enough, but working for much much more than enough sounds like a waste of time and/or greed. Also, it's hard to imagine pursuing endeavors out of passion because you've never had that luxury.

I was a startup where someone got an unconditional signing bonus. It wasn't deliberate, they just kept it simple because it was a startup and they thought they trusted the guy because he was an old friend of the CEO.

The guy immediately took leave to get some medical procedure done with a recovery time, then when he returned he quit for another job. He barely worked, collected a big signing bonus, used the company's insurance plan for a very expensive procedure, and then disappeared.

From that point forward, signing bonuses had the standard conditions attached.

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