A software engineer with just three years of experience has stunned the tech world by landing a senior role at LinkedIn, taking his annual salary from Rs 16 lakh to a staggering Rs 1.6 crore. The 10x leap has left many curious about his career journey and interview strategy. The story was shared on X by Vaibhav Agarwal, who revealed that he and the techie were colleagues at Samsung before taking different career paths. While Agarwal is now at Google, his friend secured a senior software engineer position at LinkedIn, reportedly with a total compensation of around Rs 1.6 crore. “My Friend Recently Cracked the Linked SSE Interview and he got the 95LPA Package, and CTC of around 1.6 Cr,” Agarwal wrote. Though the post mentioned “Linked,” the context in the comments confirms it’s LinkedIn, Microsoft’s professional networking platform. What makes this jump even more remarkable is that the techie graduated in 2022 from a “tier-3” college. Agarwal also wrote, “He is just 2022 grad and tier 3 college passout. He was with me in Samsung at around 16 LPA. This is the highest jump I have ever seen in terms of numbers in the package.” Take a look at the post: My Friend Recently Cracked the Linked SSE Interview and he got the fucking 95LPA Package, and CTC of around 1.6 Cr. He is just 2022 grad and tier 3 college passout. He was with me in samsung at around 16 LPA. This is the highest Jump I have ever seen in terms of Numbers in… — Vaibhav Agarwal (@va_a14) September 30, 2025 The post quickly went viral, racking up nearly 50,000 views and sparking numerous questions. One user asked, “Can you share the roadmap and interview prep tips he followed, it would be highly helpful for future hustlers.” Another commented, “That's very inspiring to know. As you both worked in Samsung, you must be knowing each other pretty well. Can you please tell what exactly he did differently than others because of which he could land such a huge jump?” Some raised concerns about accepting unusually high packages, with one user warning, “People should think twice before accepting such packages which are way higher than the average, cause on the day of layoffs, these costly resources are the first to let go.” Agarwal responded, “It is normal in LinkedIn, it is their pay scale. He in parallel got offers from Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple as well. So if you are that much capable I think thinking about layoffs is not that much major issue.”
