On Friday morning, homeless web developer David Casarez woke from his park bench in Mountain View, Calif., put on a nice shirt and tie, and carried his hand-lettered cardboard sign to a nearby highway median.
“HOMELESS,” the sign read.
“HUNGRY 4 SUCCESS. TAKE A RESUME.”
It turned out to be the perfect job-search strategy.
A passerby’s photo of him standing on the median holding the sign soon went viral on Twitter TWTR, -6.24% , and by Saturday afternoon he’d been flooded with more than 200 job offers.
“Google reached out to me,” the astounded 26-year-old told the New York Post.
“So many other companies. Pandora P, -5.82% . A bunch of startups,” he said, speaking by phone at a Starbucks near where he’d first gone begging — literally — for work.
Jeff Reeves: The biggest problem for Facebook and Netflix is they are running out of humans
“A product manager from Bitcoin.com was wondering if I could work remotely or if I want to relocate to Tokyo,” he said, with wonder in his voice as he scrolled through the offers.
“But tonight, I’ll be back on my bench in Rengstorff Park.”
Casarez grew up in the border town of Laredo, Texas.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in management information systems from Texas A&M University, landed a good web developer job at General Motors GM, +0.98% in Austin, but then cashed out his 401(k) and drove to Silicon Valley to pursue the dream of his own tech startup — only to run out of cash in June.
“I’d been living in my car for more than a year,” he said of his 2015 Ford Transit Connect utility van.
“No one was hiring. I had an interview with Apple AAPL, -0.72% in January, but the job was filled interally,” he said.
Casarez says he did some freelancing — a few web- and logo-design jobs.
But a month ago, his van was repossessed, he said, and he’s been sleeping in the park since.
On Friday, he dressed as best he could — “to be presentable to my future employers,” he explained — and set out with his new sign and a stack of résumés in a FedEx envelope.
“It was basically a make-or-break moment,” he said of his job-search breakthrough.
“I wanted to keep my head up high, keep looking forward and see what opportunity would come next,” he added.
“I was thinking, you know, like this was like my last stop. If this didn’t work, I’d go back home and give up on my dream.”
He’d only been standing on the median at El Camino Real and San Antonio Road for a couple hours when a passing driver named Jasmine Scofield stopped and asked if she could take his picture and post it online.
Sure, Casarez told her.
Today I saw this young homeless man asking for people to take a resume rather than asking for money. If anyone in the Silicon Valley could help him out, that would be amazing. Please RT so we can help David out! pic.twitter.com/ewoE3PKFx7
— FullMakeup Alchemist (@jaysc0) July 27, 2018
