I'm a former Miso engineer and the founders screwed me out of 10k

This is part of risk management of a company. The company had decided to risk the production setup without a backup at the time. Obviously the downtime of the database is an acceptable risk to them. They could bear the consequence when luck turned against them. It should not be on your shoulder.

People make mistakes all the times. What's important is how they recover and be better. I remember a story where a guy was resigning after screwing up a million dollar venture. His boss told him, you have just learned a million-dollar lesson on the company's dime and you are quitting? The guy stayed on and flourished.

But it is about the money - and it should be. It sounds like the underlying premise is that to claim the money one is due is somehow unethical and should be beneath a truly moral person. Nothing is father from the truth. If one was promised some compensation for something, he is due that compensation, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with asking for this money and absolutely no obligation to show "it was never about the money" - the money is part of the deal and it should be about it as well as about any other thing. If one is hired to do work for pay, one does it for the money, it is about the money (maybe not only, but also) and always was. Otherwise it is volunteering - which many of us also do, but Miso is not a volunteer organisation, as far as I know. So asking them to pay their debts is completely fine even if it's 100% "about the money".

How is this the right thing? I don't imagine that your former coworkers are having a good day today with this kind of publicity. They had nothing to do with this matter, and did nothing to deserve the bad attention.

I understand that it's important to get the word out, but for me, I'd put the people I care about above anything else. All I'm saying is that this could have been handled more professionally.

Stop calling it a bonus, it isn't, it's payment for your services of recruitment. The offer came as part of a written agreement from an officer of the company in relation to the duties required by employees (adding the optional duty of recruitment) and their remuneration for performing said services (your payment for recruitment). Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck.

Bonuses are when you receive additional pay for performing your required duties as an employee. eg. you were hired as a programmer, you've doing great work, here's an extra 10K.

Not only did they fail to pay your wages within X days of termination, an egregious violation of the labour code but now they are misrepresenting the employment agreement as not including written amendments made by officers of the company.

Furthermore this policy they speak of has altered the employment agreement with out consent from the employed, and failure to disclose the policy at the time the offer was made constitutes negligent misrepresentation of the contract. I'm sure if you had known that you would have only received payment while still an employee, the offer would not have induced you to perform said services for the company. Failure to inform employees of changes to the employment agreement is also likely a violation of labour law.

File with your local labour board for unpaid wages, dealing with this should cost them easily more than $10K. The last thing they want is bureaucrats around their business.

Then file in small claims court for lost wages and breach of contract.

Attach the directors of the corporation personally to the suit as directors are liable for unpaid wages. (This may not be true in your jurisdiction)

Find the statute that says that all unpaid wages must be paid within X days of quitting / termination, add damages.

Add up all your time spend dealing with the recovery of this money, as well as reporting this to the authorities, add costs.

Hopefully after this you've reached the max allowable for a small claims suit.

I am not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice.

Sorry but you need to take responsibility for forgetting to ask for the bonus at the end of six months while you were still employed by Miso. If you had remembered in all likelihood you would have been paid in full and all would have been well.

As it is, you left the company on bad terms and decide to publicly shame them. You will have trouble getting future employment as a result. Your future earnings has just potentially decreased by substantially more than $10k. How would you feel if after someone fired you they blogged about all the mistakes you made on the job publicly referring to you by name? You just don't do this. It's bad for business.