In my case, it says "intellectual rights transfer upon full payment", full stop. No pay, no right to use any work product
But yes, generally the terms of a work-for-hire contract specify an exchange of money in return for the work
However, most NDAs are completely independent of getting paid. Thus the author's advice to sign the main contract but leave off the NDA.
In fact, this was common practice for doing enterprise consulting to small businesses when I was doing it at the start of my career. You could frequently reuse layouts and components between jobs since it was mostly basic 4GL+RDB, and it was typical to have no work-for-hire clause at all or a very limited one excluding reusables; or to charge a higher price if the client insisted on the clause to cover redevelopment.
I believe this was also the model that early open source companies such as Cygnus (who I also worked for) was built on. Large companies paid us to port the toolchains to their systems, but I believe the copyright was retained by Cygnus (and presumably reassigned to the FSF).
If someone had work for hire in a separate agreement, and I was otherwise inclined to take the "wait until requested" route, I'd probably wait on returning it too. I don't think I'd sit on the contract that said I'd get paid though, and I'm sure they're usually combined. I just wouldn't point out the omission if I got a contract without one.
That wasn't really clear to me. The wording (in the second situation in the post) made it sound like their partner signed neither the contract nor the NDA.
> “No,” my partner replied. “You sent a contract. I never signed it. It isn’t my problem that you never noticed.”
They could've been more explicit about which things were or weren't signed in the scenario that they described.
The NDA itself? Well, if they aren't forcing you to sign that, I'm not so sure why you would.