I was emailed a lucrative job position through LinkedIn

[Norbert]

Last edited Mon Dec 29, 2025, 10:24 PM - Edit history (1)

It is almost to more than double what I am currently making, with the money range they were quoting. It is in the engineering field and I can check several of the bullet points. So I decided to look further. The company is Mercor, who I'm not that familiar with.

Now the bad news: It has to do with AI, which doesn't surprise me. I looked up some of the names involved with Mercor. The clincher: after viewing a couple names that sounded vaguely familiar, I see the name Paul Peter Thiel.

I am not far from retirement and could actually retire anytime to be honest. It would be nice to put extra into my retirement funds with said job, but these funds are already doing well. I am satisfied with the company I work for currently and the manager I report to told me twice recently that she does not want me to leave. The more I read on Thiel, the more unsavory a character he sounds like. Since he is a publicly avowed trumper, my research stopped immediately with the reading of his name.

The email has since been deleted.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. Trump's pal is Peter Thiel. Possible relation. NT

[Norbert]

4. It is Peter Thiel. sorry

When I first heard his name a while back, I was calling him Harold, because Harold Thiel was a former classmate of mine. I'll never get it right.

[Scrivener7]

2. I retired after Covid. I got my patients through it, and it took everything out of me, so

once it was over, I retired. It was earlier than I had planned, but I had nothing left in me.

I was very worried because I didn't have as much money as I though I needed to retire. But I have been shocked at the fact that I actually didn't need the extra. I'm doing fine.

I'm only saying this because, if you have enough, it would be a shame to do something you aren't ethically comfortable with and then later realize you never needed to do it in the first place.

[Norbert]

9. The great recession hit me hard

I was unemployed for a year and had to take some 401k money out, which I was penalized. I put extra in once I was back on my feet so I think I am where I should be now. The company I work for now was able to get me out of the nightmare I was in. Warts and all, it is still a good place to work.

I think I still have a psychological hill I am navigating through and when to jump off the employment gravy train because of my past difficulties. That will soon come even if it takes an intervention from my wife.

[Hugin]

3. Congratulations, Norbert.

From your telling it sounds as if you have encountered the rare situation where you win by not rolling the dice.

Savor it. That’s where wisdom comes from.

[Norbert]

6. Thank you, Hugin

The ulterior motive is that my resume probably needs updating and my interview skills need to be brushed up. Hope I never need to do that again, especially the interview.

[erronis]

5. Be very suspicious of job recruitment requests that seem "too good"

There are lots of bad actors using LinkedIn and other sources for recruitment when they are really looking for more personal info and people willing to send a few $100 to be considered for a plum job. The NORKs have been notorious for doing this but I'm sure others are involved.

[Norbert]

13. You are right. The thought had crossed my mind

that it could be a scam too and if Mercor is an up-and-coming company, there may be unscrupulous people out there helping themselves without Mercor even knowing about it.

[mahina]

14. Just be sure to check with the company directly. There's a ton of.

Fake job recruiting from not just LinkedIn, but all the job boards that exist only to extract your private data, Social Security number etc. I have had personal experience of this. Fakers were sending bogus recruiting letters, supposedly from my company. Had nothing to do with us but you wouldn’t know it.

[iemanja]

7. If that job is still available

You could always apply and if you get it use the offer to get a retention raise. They won’t meet the salary, but they could well give you a wage bump.

And there is legitimate recruitment on LinkedIn in. I was approached that way, but the job didn’t meet my salary expectations. A work colleague was given an offer that she used to get a retention raise. She told me a few months later, and I successfully applied for an equity raise.

[usonian]

8. Look at this one. Even just for chuckles.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/29/sam-altman-openai-job-search-ai-harms

[BoycottTwitter]

10. Hijacking this thread to warn about job offer scams

When you receive a job offer especially one that seems too good to be true it's very important you verify it's real.

Of course in this case you got lucky because the people who might be scammers used a name you didn't like so you thankfully deleted it.

Here are some tips that are not foolproof but can help identify some scams:

1. Did they try charging a fee to do the interview? This one is a common scam: they give you a very good too good to be true job offer then say it will cost for example $500 or a high fee to do the job interview then once you pay they either come up with more fees or disappear.

2. Are they using official accounts? Do you notice any misspellings? For email unless it's a very small business the email should come from the company domain name not gmail or yahoo.

3. Try directly reaching out to the company and verifying that the offer really exists. Note that you should type the email address yourself, don't hit reply. Or get the phone number of the company from the official website that you found yourself (don't click on any ads) and don't click on links provided by the person talking to you about the job offer, it must be from the actual official website.

4. Does the company really exist? Use Google or Bing maps and if available street view to check if the any addresses they used really exist.

[some_of_us_are_sane]

11. Norbert, you have GOOD instincts!

Apparently, the devil covers himself in money but you recognized the name and spotted his sharp red tail sticking out of those expensive tailored trousers.

[IronLionZion]

12. Many think AI is a bubble about to pop

There is a ton of investment now as they offer large salaries to recruit the best talent, build more data centers, buy up tons of chips/memory, and so on. But who knows how long that's going to last.

I suspect AI will become another productivity tool to assist workers. But it's not likely to achieve the outrageous outcomes that it's promoters are promising.



Thiel probably has data on all of us and tracks what we're posting online.

Some info on Mercor. Thiel awarded them fellowships to grow their startup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercor