This “Contract” Could Cost New Developers $20,000 And 2 Years Of Their Careers

How new developers can avoid a popular contract scheme that hurts their careers before they begin.

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Dedicating hours to optimizing your LinkedIn and other professional media might attract an increasingly common entry-level job offer that not only won’t work out–it might cost you $20,000.

Even in an employer-favored job market and economy teetering on the edge of a recession, technical workers enjoy a nearly unmatched ability to choose where to work. Don’t believe the “return to office” hype. If you can develop and use cloud technologies, you can easily expand your job search nationally and internationally.

Unfortunately, the ability to search this widely also means you can be found by anyone in the world and, as someone “green” in the industry, you’re a ripe target for a contract work scheme that I narrowly avoided while searching for my first development job in the early 2020s.

The elevator pitch is this: A “training firm” promises to “hire” a new graduate to train them for jobs within their “network of partner organizations.” In return, the firm gets a “finder’s fee” of x percent of the employee’s new salary and the employee/trainee is bound to work for a period of at least two years.