Quit Yahoo, get $25,000 bonus?

Here's one good thing about being a Yahoo employee: if you quit and join Yammer, a social networking service forbusinesses, in the next 60 days you'll pocket a $25,000 signing bonus. 

That's the offer that was tweeted on Thursday by Yammer CEO David Sacks. 

"They've got a lot of great engineers there," Sacks said in an interview with Reuters. "The talent has been misused by senior managementwhich has made a lot of bad decisions." 

Of course, when Sacks (whose credits include producing and financing the 2005 film Thank You For Smoking) isn't whispering sweet come-ons to Yahoo employees, he's holding a gun to their heads. Infuriated by Yahoo's controversial decision to sue Facebook for patent infringement, he vowed a day earlier that he would never hire another Yahoo employee that doesn't leave the company in the next 60 days. 

Sacks later revised his ultimatum, so that the blacklist applies only to Yahoo senior managers and not rank-and-file employees. But he noted on Thursday that people who continue to work at Yahoo do so at their own peril. 

"There will be a growing stigma attached to working at Yahoo as long as it continues to pursue this type of patent troll strategy," Sacks said. 

Regardless of how Yahoo workers feel about their employer's litigation strategy, it's not hard to imagine that many in Sunnyvale are brushing up their resumes. The struggling internet company is said to be preparing for a massive reorganization that could slash thousands of jobs. 

Yammer, which currently has 250 employees and expects to finish the year at between 500 to 600 employees, may find it has more takers for its $25,000 prize than it can pay out. 

--by Alexei Oreskovic