"Making bank" at MySQL (AB/INC)

Just because this topic came up more than once at MySQL Connect...

Apparently, some alumni have been awarded bonuses for certain pieces of work during their time at MySQL and I guess that there was an expectation from some that the same applied to the work I did. Now, I don't want anyone to get the impression that I am experiencing "sour grapes" over the past - I actually enjoyed much of my time at MySQL. I also made many good friends of which I am happy to have stayed in contact with many of them to this day. I must say, it is the people that I miss the most when I move from one job to the next. What made working for MySQL a bit different is how we interacted with each other, which was mostly through IRC and email; we only met in person perhaps once or twice a year in our developer or company meetings at some exotic location.

 So I want to clear the air by revealing all about my bonuses at MySQL.

I have never received any bonus or award for any work or project at MySQL. This includes the plugins framework, the audit plugin interface, stored procedures, storage engines or anything else I may have touched while I worked for MySQL. I was never promised any award or bonus for any work related to plugins, parsers or stored procedures.

There was some hand-wavy hints for several storage engine side projects: There was some wishy-washy verbal hints about something for Project Amira passing the SAP VERI test but that project was cancelled soon after that condition was met for reasons several levels above my pay grade. As everyone knows, verbal promises are only worth as much as the paper its written on.

I was never offered and nor have I ever received any gift for publicly rejecting SUN's original P.I.A.

I was not a particularly well paid MySQL contractor/employee. I actually took a very significant pay cut from leaving my previous workplace by going to MySQL. From what I was kinda indirectly told by SUN's on-boarding team, I was among the lowest annual salary MySQL employee at the time of their acquisition of MySQL and the lowest of the engineers working within the USA.

I did not "make bank" at MySQL.

I did it for the joy.