The greed in this world sickens me.

Someone I hired last month just asked me for a salary advance of N1.7M.

I’m so tired because this was the last thing I needed to see after the day I had yesterday.

Not 500k, not 700k. Not even something remotely proportional to the amount of time you’ve actually worked.

₦1.7M.

Seventeen months of her salary.

And I sat there reading the email twice because surely there had to be a typo.

Surely you meant 1–2 months? Surely there was a misplaced decimal point somewhere?

But no.

The audacity is sickening.

You’re one month into a job. I barely know you. You’ve barely done anything tangible yet. We’re still at the stage where I’m trying to see if you even understand the role you were hired for.

And somehow, in your mind, the most reasonable thing to do is to ask your employer to essentially bankroll the next year and a half of your life.

And funnily enough, I haven’t even talked about 1/10th of the things I’ve experienced from employees.

I even had to reach out to older people who run organizations to be sure I’m not doing something wrong, and each had crazy stories to tell.

At a point last year, I began hiring more Indian talent, and so far, I haven’t seen this pattern come up.

Sometimes, you just have to ask yourself where exactly we went wrong culturally.

Because discipline, restraint, and professional boundaries shouldn’t be things you have to teach adults.

If you’ve worked in a place for years and built trust, maybe we can have a conversation about advances, emergencies, and support.

But one month?

One month and you’re already treating your employer like a personal credit facility.

And then people wonder why founders become extremely guarded over time.

It usually gets to a point, guyss.
What’s this madnesss? To be clear, the HR handled this in good faith.

Despite the natural assumption that she was trying to take advantage of her position, we simply chose to believe she might not fully understand what a salary advance typically means.

So we responded professionally and clarified the policy.

But experiences like this do remind you of a few things.

For employees, especially early in a role, the first few months are really about building trust and credibility. It’s the stage where people are still getting to know your work, your judgment, and how you operate.

And in most workplaces, requests like salary advances usually happen after some time has passed and some trust has been built.

There’s also the simple reality that employers aren’t personal credit facilities. Support can exist in workplaces, but it usually grows out of a longer working relationship.

Sometimes situations like this genuinely come from misunderstanding rather than bad intent. And when that’s the case, a quick clarification usually solves it.

But it’s also one of those moments that reminds you how differently people understand workplace boundaries.

And as someone running a team, you see these things more often than you’d expect.