Would you pay to land a job?
A software program engineer went viral final month after promising to pay upwards of $10,000 to anybody who will help them discover a related six-figure job. It labored — and now it is turning into a pattern.
Argenis De La Rosa, a pc science undergraduate on the Harvard Extension College, wrote in a LinkedIn publish that he would give somebody the five-figure sum in the event that they helped him land a software program developer function.
De La Rosa mentioned that he would create a contract for each events to signal, making certain that at any time when he began getting paid in his six-figure function, he would repay the $10,000 debt in increments. The deal would solely undergo if he acquired a proposal.
“Once I receives a commission, you receives a commission,” De La Rosa wrote in a LinkedIn publish with over 400 reactions. “It is that easy.”
De La Rosa informed Enterprise Insider that he acquired “nonstop” messages from individuals within the first 24 hours after he posted. The messages included mentorship or referral presents from engineers at tech firms, although some had been “very sketchy” gross sales pitches, he mentioned.
He informed the outlet that he rapidly acquired three job interview presents within the month because the publish went dwell, although he’s nonetheless searching for full-time work.
Then, Ryan Prescott, a Maine-based engineer, noticed De La Rosa’s publish and made his personal. The one distinction between the posts is that Prescott requested extra particularly for a software program developer function paying at the very least $120,000, not only for a six-figure wage.
Prescott’s LinkedIn publish went viral when an X person screenshotted it and posted it on X. The publish gathered 1.6 million views on Elon Musk’s app.
i’ve by no means seen something like this earlier than—this takes “open to work” to a completely new degree. pic.twitter.com/nWNGcd2yMJ
— signüll (@signulll) February 24, 2025
After Prescott posted, a startup CEO contacted him a few senior front-end engineer function. Prescott went via a number of rounds of interviews and in the end landed the function. As a result of his boss was the one who reached out, Prescott will not be paying the $10,000. Nonetheless, Prescott says that the publish helped him get observed in a crowded market.
“I might actually simply encourage extra individuals to distinguish themselves in unusual and noteworthy methods,” Prescott informed BI.
Different LinkedIn members wrote comparable posts over the previous month, and a few even elevated how a lot they had been keen to pay for assist getting a developer job.
Jean-Philippe Lebœuf, a senior product engineer searching for work, wrote that he was keen to pay $30,000 to anybody who helped him discover a distant job paying at the very least $120,000. Ray Morrison, a software program engineer, mentioned he would pay $15,000 in increments of $500 per 30 days for anybody who helped him land a task with a wage of at the very least $140,000.
Tech hiring has dropped by at the very least 20% in August 2024 in comparison with August 2018, per LinkedIn knowledge. Software program engineering roles are down by 26%, IT by 27%, and mission administration by 25% in that time-frame.