A viral thread on Reddit has left people swooning for all the best reasons as it tends to converge the boundaries between dating, networking, and career opportunities. With the subject ‘Got an 18 LPA offer because of a Hinge match,’ the thread is posted on the Reddit by ‘Indianboysontinder’ by a final-year student who has just completed a placement season filled with anxiety and rejection.
“I am from a tier 1 ish college. Not exactly tier 1 but definitely above most tier 2s,” said the student. Unlike many other applicants, his academics were an obstacle for him too.
“I had backlogs. Two officially. Actually five because of an accident but I managed to write off three," he said, showing that most companies do not even see him for having a backlog.
Despite the numerous unsuccessful efforts and low confidence, the student finally accepted an offer from an AI startup for Rs 7 LPA. The reason for the decision, the student confessed, was out of fear.
“I had to take it as I didn't think I'd see more decent interview calls, to be honest,” he wrote. This is a sentiment which many new recruits will sadly recognize.
During this period, the student also paired with a woman on the dating app Hinge. This casual meeting took an unexpected turn when the two started discussing their professional lives. It was during one such conversation that the student made some remarks about his work situation.
This was when she revealed that she knew someone, a friend of hers who was an HR manager in one of the tech giants in Bengaluru. According to the post, she was the one who ensured that there was internal awareness of his profile because it was impossible for someone with a backlog to have that kind of awareness.
Unlike traditional campus interviews dominated by algorithm problem-solving, the process was centered around real work done by the student. The interviewers screened his GitHub and LinkedIn profiles, asking him to explain his codebases.
He shared that his projects stood out because they weren't cookie-cutter clones of projects; he had taken a very popular open-source project and made it more optimized, adding AI features while improving the user experience significantly. Side projects presented him with apps and extensions to prove the capability over theoretical perfection.
This student was refreshingly truthful about how he uses AI tools for learning and development. He confessed that without AI, many projects that he does would not have been possible, but with AI, he could develop good systems and explain their statements.
Though he thought his performance was just average, the outcome left him shocked. This was because an offer letter with an LOI of 18 LPA was waiting for him in his mailbox. The offer letter clearly stated that the CTC was pending final approvals, but the gist was that his career path was overnight changed.
The post went viral on Reddit with a huge number of upvotes and comments. Despite some people considering it a case of luck, there were those who looked at it from a perspective that sometimes networking occurs outside the boardroom or the confines of a LinkedIn message.
