Would you pay to land a job?

A software engineer went viral last month after promising to pay upwards of $10,000 to anyone who can help them find a relevant six-figure job. It worked — and now it’s becoming a trend.

Argenis De La Rosa, a computer science undergraduate at the Harvard Extension School, wrote in a LinkedIn post that he would give someone the five-figure sum if they helped him land a software developer role.

De La Rosa said that he would create a contract for both parties to sign, ensuring that whenever he started getting paid in his six-figure role, he would pay off the $10,000 debt in increments. The deal would only go through if he received an offer.

“When I get paid, you get paid,” De La Rosa wrote in a LinkedIn post with over 400 reactions. “It’s that simple.”

De La Rosa told Business Insider that he received “nonstop” messages from interested people in the first 24 hours after he posted. The messages included mentorship or referral offers from engineers at tech companies, though some were “very sketchy” sales pitches, he said.

He told the outlet that he quickly received three job interview offers in the month since the post went live, though he is still looking for full-time work.

Then, Ryan Prescott, a Maine-based engineer, saw De La Rosa’s post and made his own. The only difference between the posts is that Prescott asked more specifically for a software developer role paying at least $120,000, not just for a six-figure salary.

Prescott’s LinkedIn post went viral when an X user screenshotted it and posted it on X. The post gathered 1.6 million views on Elon Musk’s app.

i’ve never seen anything like this before—this takes “open to work” to an entirely new level. pic.twitter.com/nWNGcd2yMJ

— signüll (@signulll) February 24, 2025

After Prescott posted, a startup CEO contacted him about a senior front-end engineer role. Prescott went through multiple rounds of interviews and ultimately landed the role. Because his boss was the one who reached out, Prescott won’t be paying the $10,000. However, Prescott says that the post helped him get noticed in a crowded market.

“I would really just encourage more people to differentiate themselves in strange and remarkable ways,” Prescott told BI.

Other LinkedIn members wrote similar posts over the past month, and some even increased how much they were willing to pay for help getting a developer job.

Jean-Philippe Lebœuf, a senior product engineer looking for work, wrote that he was willing to pay $30,000 to anyone who helped him find a remote job paying at least $120,000. Ray Morrison, a software engineer, said he would pay $15,000 in increments of $500 per month for anyone who helped him land a role with a salary of at least $140,000.

Tech hiring has dropped by at least 20% in August 2024 compared to August 2018, per LinkedIn data. Software engineering roles are down by 26%, IT by 27%, and project management by 25% in that time frame.