Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?
Soham Parekh is all the rage on Twitter right now with a bunch of startups coming out of the woodwork saying they either had currently employed him or had in the past.
Serious question: why aren't so many startups hiring processes filtering out a candidate who is scamming/working multiple jobs?
Being employed in four companies is obviously not sustainable, but half of that is fairly common.
I know several people who spent months working for two companies: one full time, the other part time. The most productive few would reach two full time positions and actually keep delivering for over a year.
The reason this happens at all is that sufficiently large organisations expect performance to be in a specific range - if it's too low you'll be fired, but going the extra mile will not yield benefits, as your compensation is decided by the assigned budget and promotions are rare.
Case in point: a few years ago my former co-worker was given "overtime" which was actually a hidden raise, as management really wanted to keep him, but couldn't officially increase his compensation. The organisation for which we worked eventually cracked down on such practices, so he left to work at a place which would compensate him this much and more without resorting to such tricks.
Having a side hustle or even excessively volunteering isn't much different in terms of workload. A lot of people do this. It's always the meetings that are the hard part.
people above and around you prefer if you stay within the range. over performing stresses other people out and causes conflict.
We hired Soham.
I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.
Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good. He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.
> The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.
I worked with an overemployed person (not Soham). It was exactly like this.
Started out great. They could do good work when they knew they were in focus. Then they started pushing deliverables out farther and farther until it was obvious they weren't trying. Meetings were always getting rescheduled with an array of excuses. Lots of sad stories about family members having tragedies over and over again.
It wears everyone down. Team mates figure it out first. Management loses patience.
Worst part is that one person exhausts the entire department's trust. Remote work gets scrutinized more. Remote employees are tracked more closely. It does a lot of damage to remote work.
> Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good.
I doubt it's a dev shop because the dev shops use rotating stand-ins to collect the paychecks, not the same identity at every job. This guy wanted paychecks sent directly to him.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
> He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.
Wild to be cutting work trial days in half to do other jobs. Although I think he was also testing companies to see who was lenient enough to let him get away with all of this.
> However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
What a silly waste of his time and reputation (in addition to other people's).
If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?
> If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?
Much much easier said than done.
99% of companies that want to hire employees won't hire a contractor/consultant instead for that job.
How do I know? 15 years experience, top candidate in many interviews, great salary / employment. Yet every time I've tried to get a consulting arrangement set up it's been extremely hard and ultimately unprofitable (i.e. pays significantly less than full-time job, on average).
> How do I know? 15 years experience, top candidate in many interviews, great salary / employment. Yet every time I've tried to get a consulting arrangement set up it's been extremely hard and ultimately unprofitable (i.e. pays significantly less than full-time job, on average).
Sounds like a legit negotiation strategy:
- You prefer a consulting arrangement over being hired.
- The company prefers to pay less for the job.
So both involved sides get a part of the pie that is negotiated about, and has to compromise on another aspect.
I think this is a US specific thing.
I work as a contractors with all my clients (who know of each others) and they all pay significantly more per hour compared to an employee. As an employee I could expect to make 1/4 of what I actually make.
The only exception in this arrangement was when I worked with an US company, they wanted to hire me as an employee and paid 1k per month to some company in my country just to hire me. An insane waste of money, not to mention taxes on my side.
> If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?
I've worked with several small contracting businesses, including some that came highly recommended.
They were all very inefficient relative to having someone in-house. They also came with the problem that institutional knowledge was non-existent because they had a rotating crew of people working for you.
Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge. The companies he applied for specifically did not want to contract the work out to a body shop.
> Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge.
Then make it part of the contracting deal that the contractors have to give the in-house people sufficient training about the code/project that they worked on.
That's what happens when you hire bad contractors. There are so many bad contractors and selection bar for contractors is much lower compared to employees.
If you keep your standards high when hiring contractors you'll get the same level of quality you have with employees. Contractor agencies are also pretty happy to have long lasting clients (I have been with my current clients respectively for: 4 years, 3 years, 1 years and 1 month).
You just described why consulting makes big bucks
> I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
It is hilarious that companies that hired a guy who was scamming them are also convinced they are great at assessing the skill level of devs.
Is it so hard to believe that someone can be a great candidate in an interview when you're getting 100% of their attention and then be horrible at their job when you're getting 20% of it because they're juggling 5 jobs?
Being a good developer and being a scammer are completely uncorrelated variables.
Someone can be a good developer and also be a scammer. I don't understand why you think this is hilarious or weird.
It's hilarious because companies use such scammable ways to define who is "top 0.1%"
Also there's a ton amazing engs out there who want and need work but the companies all only want that one "perfect" guy (or gal), as if such a thing exists
Exactly. It's so bleak that this industry throws integrity out the window in the name of productivity.
> Being a good developer and being a scammer are completely uncorrelated variables.
One could expect good developers to be less inclined to fraud as they may not “need” it as much.
That also made me thing of Berkson’s paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
If these were really independent traits they would look negatively correlated as we talk about people who are good OR scammers.
It's not about need, it's about beating the system. The "hack".
The “need” of beating the system. Good developers may or may not have a lower deficit of “it”.
we interviewed him and passed. he was horrible. it blows my mind seeing these reports of him crushing interviews and being a great dev. the bar for programmers is woefully low. on second thought there's got to be more to this story because he came to us through a recruiter who talked him up big time. did he come to you through a recruiter too? if so then either the recruiter is in on it or he has an army of different recruiters getting him in front of yc people. also you say you worked with him in person but other reports say he was in india. something not adding up here. i can verify my story by giving you the Nth character of the quirky email address he uses. can you do the same?
It’s probably because the interview process relied heavily on leetcode questions. If it did, one can effectively prepare for that and only that and can be overemployed.
Is it still common to ask leetcode questions during interview?
Leetcode questions are still the primary way to test skill in interviews.
Where? I have candidates solve a real closed-ended problem in the space we’re working in. I also give them a lot of source code to read and respond to and find issues with.
Do employment contracts in the US not normally have "sole focus" clauses? We have those in my location.
I have seen that in employment paperwork at a few companies. Generally, you just mention you have side jobs and they okay it. Or you ignore it entirely and nobody notices.
I think Google has that.
Possibly these are becoming more common because of /r/overemployed.
Most companies don't want you working another W-2 job, but realize they can't just ban all consulting.
I think an copyright/IP assignment contract is standard in many or most U.S. software jobs, at least when working for a big enough company that they have a lawyer who handles the NDA/employment paperwork.
That pretty much automatically rules out over employment because you can’t separately promise two different companies that you’re assigning all software copyrights to them rather than you, it’s an incompatible contract (even if it’s limited to work hours - you’re pretending to both companies that you’re working 9-5 solely for them).
A large percentage of U.S. software jobs (and probably nearly all YCombinator startups) are in California. Other states might be different, but stuff you do outside of work doesn't automatically become your employer's IP in California.
There are some nuances and I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of it is that three ways to trigger the IP to attach to your employer:
1. You do it on-prem or during work hours (but work hours are flexible for salaried employees)
2. You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)
3. It's reasonably related to what you or other people do at your day job
If none of those apply, then you own it. That's relevant to the discussion at hand because, at least in California, you could work from home for two companies with unrelated businesses and not break any rules.
I don’t think so. Or at most it talks about “reasonable effort” or something vague like that.
/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing
Fascinating. My locality is usually kinda lax but it's something that we have.
I would have thought that with the litigious culture in the US and non-competes etc... this would all be watertight. Seems kinda ridiculous that with a non-compete you can't work for a competitor once you've quit but you're free to do so while you still work for your employer, lol.
Employment contracts in the US are rare.
> Employment contracts in the US are rare.
Really? Does that mean what it say: you get a job and you do not get a written contract?
I don't think, in 38 years of working in 3 different countries, I've ever NOT had a written contract, even for temp or contractor roles. WTAF?
For established companies, I've always had a written employment agreement which discussed some terms common to all employees, including anti-moonlighting, usually ip assignment, etc. But I don't think I've ever had a contract that described what I going to do... maybe when I worked for a school district, but there my position title didn't actually match the work anyway; the position title was about being a tech helper in the classroom, but my position was at the district office with field work that only rarely had interaction with students.
Yes, really.
Executives can be an exception.
Exceptional circumstances are an exception.
Increasingly less common union jobs are an exception.
But ‘at will’ is far more common in the US.
Employment contracts that are reduced to a single explicit written agreement are relatively rare in the US, most employment contracts are implied by conduct.
Wow, that's interesting. I didn't know that.
A lot of people think of "contract" as specifically a written document, but that's not what a "contract" is in law, the written document (if it exists) can be very powerful evidence that (1) there is a contract, and (2) what its terms are, but contracts exist without them.
While US employment is usually at will without a defined contract term, there are mutually enforceable obligations, including some definition of what the employee is obligated to do for the employer and that the employer is obligated to pay the employee at some specified rate assuming the employee's obligations are met. That's a contract. Exactly what the detailed terms are may be difficult to prove absent a single comprehensive written document, but it is a contract.
did you notice any hints of him cheating on the interview with LLMs? If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people
> If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people
If you can get and hold dozens of concurrent full-time engineering jobs by scamming people, you can get much further much more quickly than is possible in any one of the full-time engineering jobs you can get.
This is obviously unethical, relies on non-guaranteed success, and falls apart if people are able to effectively claw back your gains from scamming, but that's not (obviously) enough to outweigh the desire for quick returns for some people.
> effectively claw back your gains from scamming
Do you really think several busy startups are going to band up and sue a person (esp in California)?
I don't doubt he's in the 1% or 0.1% of candidates you're interviewing, but there is one very simple solution startups could apply to make it easier to find top talent -> remove "US ONLY" from their job listings.
You might not be aware, but hiring outside of the country causes a whole slew of other points of friction and complexity. It actually isn't "one very simple solution" in practice, which is why many startups don't do it.
I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard.
1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service
2. You can also not hire them, and use their services as independent contractors instead. I've never had an issue doing this with my finance teams, as long as the contractor submits a valid invoice they don't care who they are. Plus, it's good for cashflow (net 30 to net 90 is pretty standard) and the hire gets a nice tax save on their end.
I do understand that at large companies it can be tricky, but IMHO at startups there is little excuse. I suppose it all doesn't matter if you're playing with unlimited silicon valley VC money, I've only ever had to deal with european investors and they love a bit of smart frugality.
Oh so you’re not American but you’re explaining how obvious it is that American companies should hire outside of America
I agree if I had the UK talent pool domestically, European investors, a different health insurance regime, and existed in a different timezone, the calculus might be different.
Aside: how many people were at the company where you were paying recruiters $25k to find people?
Most US citizens applying for software engineering jobs can't even get a response to their resume, and then I read stories like this.
all the jobs are being outsourced is why
I did two full-time jobs for a month as part of changing jobs fifteen years ago and it’s exceedingly intense but otherwise was fine; eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have. Employers don’t like this because that’s a lot of work they could have persuaded an employee to provide as unpaid overtime labor instead; much this outrage is simple jealousy. If you’re doing the job to the specifications requested at a sufficient level to remain employed, then they have no basis to cry outrage. Employment is just as monogamous as marriages are: sometimes, not always.
24-18 = 6 hours "non-working" time. Eating, washing and shitting is min 1 hour/day.So 5 hours of bed time with around 4.75 hrs of sleep at most, because we don't fall asleep right away.
The math doesn't work long term. It may be kept for 1-2 months even when a person is 21 yrs old, but I doubt it it can be sustained more than that.
It doesn’t necessarily take 18 hours a day to do two full-time jobs for a full workday. Certainly I’ve never spent longer than three weeks doing 16h/day! I don’t advise it.
They said 18 waking hours, not working hours
> eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have
Lol - you don't have enough hobbies.
Turns out I prefer some of my hobbies to benefit other people’s goals, which is often sated by employment.
What I find cringeworthy is @Suhail saying they thought he was in the US but actually was in India—outing his company as not checking employment eligibility [0]. If he was actually allowed to work in the US—which doesn't seem to be the case since he hasn't responded to any replies asking about this—then they hired someone who underperformed, or in the worst case violated a company policy they might have that employees cannot have another job. Hardly seems like something worth shouting from rooftops.
[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940441569276158190
The Tweet clearly says they fired in him the first week and confronted him about the lying/scamming. It seems very clear that they figured it out right away and confronted him about it.
But they haven't checked his employment eligibility or he wouldn't have started his first week.
Legally, you have three days to complete an I-9 after starting a new position.
Given that there's no oversight of the verification process, that can slide, too.
This is my question too.
I'm no longer job searching but every interview involved multiple steps and "background checks."
I'm seeing the dude's resume has him working half a dozen jobs in a year which even to me is a huge red flag. Then he has a github with automated commits... I don't want to be disparaging to start ups because its brutal out there but how does someone like that have such a high success rate? Is he taking a super low salary or something?
To add to this. It would be great to see which companies he interviewed at but didn't get the job. Would argue those companies have better BS-detectors conducting the interviews.
On Twitter some of the founders discussed this. He would give references to people who answered the phone and then praised his work generically. One person said they thought it was strange that both of his reference checks seemed like really young guys, but it's the startup world so they overlooked it.
There was one Tweet from someone who said they did a reference check from someone who said he did good work when he was working, but he was working multiple jobs at the same time so he wasn't working much. Maybe he assumed his references wouldn't be checked often, and maybe he was right?
For my last job — the guy who was supposed to verify my permanent address called me and asked me to ask someone in my village to take a photo of the house with same day newspaper in the view and send it to him. I forwarded the request to my future employer asking whether it was the normal verification procedure :-)
Unicorns are easier to find than newspapers. If you threaten to shoot me unless I bring newspaper - I am not even sure where they sell them anymore in my city.
Background checks come in different varieties, usually it's criminal and global watchlist checks. Employment and education check is couple $$ extra for the employer, and some employers really don't mind.
It’s also possible to “freeze” your employment history report just like you can freeze your credit report. Which prevents even companies with the wherewithal to do an employment history check from getting that information.
Interesting, how do to that "freeze"? I thought it's all data brokers I don't have any leverage on.
https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
You have to do it via a mailed-in form, but I did, and got a confirmation letter back. I haven't assessed the efficacy of it, but supposedly mine is.
age
he's a really talented engineer, crushed our interviews. the funny thing was that he actually had multiple companies on his linkedin at the same time, including ours. we just thought they must have been internships or something and he never updated them (he felt a bit chaotic). but then it turned out he was working at all of them simultaneously.
worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job (we also let him go when we discovered the multiple jobs)
How was he talented? All the stories are the same. "Talented" etc. But then it leads to he never did any work. How can you assess his talent?
Perhaps he's talented at interviewing? Turns out this is the only skill you really need...
All I hear is "really good at interviewing."
The people assessing his talent are falling for the same delusion as the people conducting the interview.
If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.
in fairness to some interview processes there are ways you could legit pass a valid interview and then short change the job. We do a problem scenario / proposed solution that's shared a few days in advance. Good candidates (and good frauds) can ace this with strong technical skills, relevant experience and maybe an hour or so of prep time. We'd take this as strong signal, because (and I'd hope more companies do this) we're optimizing for talented candidates, not minimizing people who are going to work multiple concurrent jobs.
> but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing.
In my opinion and experience, being a competent developer and being a good interviewer are even less related than being a competent developer and being a good interviewee (and the latter are already very unrelated).
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Did he just lie and say he wasn't working at those places? Or did the question never come up?
When I used to interview I always had to check a box that said I wasn't currently employed, or they would ask at some point.
Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?
When we had an OE person they could do good work if you gave them a lot of time, but getting them to communicate and be present with the team was hell. You had to always be tracking them down, getting them to respond, and working any meetings (which we had few of) into some narrow time slot where they were available.
It also drags everyone else down. The team figures out what's going on. They get tired of adjusting their communication around the one person who's always distracted and doing something else.
Basically, it turns into a lot of work for everyone else to get work out of the OE person. Like they can do good work, but they're going to make everyone else work hard to extract it from them because they're busy juggling multiple jobs.
All of the Soham stories I've read today have been the same: Good work when he was working, but he was caught because he wasn't working much.
Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...
People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.
It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.
This is a really good perspective, and I've seen a similar impact from "under employed" members of my teams. We have group-level product managers who have several scrum team-level PMs under them. The idea is they keep broader alignment and bigger-picture consistency, but when they don't spend time with each of the scrum teams, or miss planning meetings and important discussions the teams pay the price from lack of communication, coordination and a shared understanding.
> People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.
I had the same experience as you with an "overemployed" person: Working with them is really bad for everyone else. They lie, play extreme politics, throw teammates under the bus, make you work harder for everything, and they don't care if it causes you harm because you're just a temporary coworker at one of their "Js"
There's nothing to celebrate about these people. They screw over their teammates far more than the company they work for.
> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs
What blows my mind is people think overemployment of an engineer is bad, but it is more than acceptable for CEO to held top positions in different companies.
I mean, most of my experience with large companies is that things are usually better for my team when the executive team is leaving us alone. A note here and there is nice; but any more focus and it's not great... better for everyone if they're busy doing something else. :P
CEOs get fired too when a board with sufficient power doesn’t feel like they are performing.
The difference is in most cases the CEO owns the business or a good chunk of it so they’re actually capital owners and employees in name only. If you own the business you make the rules.
It’s not acceptable
I think you just described most of the C level executives in the tech industry. They leave companies behind destroyed, with a big pay check. But it’s unethical if simple engineers do it. Sure.
Not sure what your direct experience is, but the difference I've experienced first hand is that C-suite are INTENSELY focused on the single company but only for a relatively short period of time. They're not spread too thin; they're motivated solely by short-term incentives. An OE engineer is both, and we can agree they all suck for people who want to do meaningful work and build an awesome team - but they seem very different to me.
Most people are not putting full effort into their jobs, which is why we are considered heros.
So you could fight us, but plenty just join us in playing games, lowering expectations, and collecting their check and going home. We are awful colleagues if you have ambition, but if you do not, we get along fine with people.
It’s called team building. You can believe in it or not. You can join a company that values that, or not.
Where is the line between team and cult?
Cults are a subset of teams.
Why do you need to draw a line? Can there be good cults and bad teams?
Both have implicit contracts, and a contract requires consideration on both sides. The parties define the value of the consideration, so you can have a junior cult member who feels they are getting good value for what they pay, or a SW dev at an insurance company who feels they don't. I also don't see much difference in your ability to affect your situation if you are unhappy with the current state.
> Where is the line between team and cult?
Typically employers pay you and cults don't.
Cults can provide food, housing, and pay.(scientology employs alot of its members)
Sometimes it's NDA. Depends on what company does, but it's hard to imagine a product that does not compete with e.g. Google.
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Honestly, it’s the way I’m planning to go. Not 4 simultaneous full time jobs, but 2 (or one fulltime job and 2 contractor part time jobs). Reason: it’s easier to pass the interview for less demanding jobs (not faang, not second level faang), they are less demanding in the day to day (no “exceeds expectations”, “meets expectations”, “under expectations”, just simply “good job Joe!” and “shit happens Joe”), they are usually less structured (no silly ex-faang engineers/managers playing god). They usually pay less, ofc, hence the need to have a couple of jobs.
At least in western europe, it’s very hard to land a 130K job, but two 65K jobs? Rather fine.
I wonder how two full time contracts could even work out in Europe. Surely they both can't pay the social security contributions, pension etc?
Also don't most work contracts expressly prohibit taking a second job, with the reasoning that the company expects employees to rest so they stay productive in the main job?
It's hard to get a 130K job in EU but it's easy to reach and exceed that as an independent contractor, so that's an avenue you could try out.
Here in Germany you are currently only allowed to work 48hours per week. Also there are strict laws for companies to actually track work time.
So it is absolutely impossible for someone here to have two full time jobs without committing working time fraud.
But even if you could, it would make literally no sense two have jobs as you earn vastly more with freelancing anyway. You would scam yourself.
The most optimal move is to have one regular job so you get health care and social security and do freelancing on the side. If you work contract allows that, of course.
not only that but the german tax system is designed in a way to make holding multiple jobs as unattractive as possible.
>Also don't most work contracts expressly prohibit taking a second job
Every single full time work contract that wasn't written by a complete moron spells out that full time is in fact full time.
The overemployed crowd just ignores it an hope they don't get sued / word spreads / prior gigs won't reference
But when you have multiple jobs, doesn't admin end up being a greater proportion of your time since you have to deal with it for several companies?
It’s not that I may do it for fun precisely. I want to pay off my house, but I don’t see myself working for the next 30 years earning as much as I have been earning in the last 3 years. Economy is going bad, countries are in war, and everything is just getting harder… if I can double my income (and hence reduce by half the time I’m exposed as a worker to this society) then I’ll do it. Juggling between two jobs doesn’t sound that bad anymore.
Odds are this is a dev shop with more than one person doing at least some things. It would explain how “he” was able to get so many jobs and maintain appearances. And a lot of startups don’t have the best screening processes to begin with (have a beer with a founder, check out their source code, you’re hired!). This is exactly the place where the structure and processes of larger companies can be a benefit. And even then, people work multiple jobs and get away with it. It’s become popular post COVID.
Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.
Think so too. Also because different companies have different "reviews" of his work. Some saying he was only good at interviews, others saying the quality of work was good. Must have been diffferent people working.
How do you explain multiple places with in office work corroborating that he came into the office?
I can't even find one job. What's his secret?
He perfected the hiring game, probably automated fake activity on his GitHub, lied on his resume, among other things: https://leaderbiography.com/soham-parekh/
There are a few comments from the companies that hired him in the og twitter thread [0]. Sounds like he was actually really good at interviews. Kinda shows how broken the hiring system is if you can smash an interview but fail catastrophically at the job.
[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940287384131969067
He was good at the office politics kabuki. Wore the right masks and all.
GP is asking how is he able to land multiple jobs in the first place when they can’t even land one.
Office politics comes after you land a job so it doesn’t explain why he was so successful at getting multiple offers.
I’ve seen claims on Twitter that he used multiple tactics:
1. Good ol’ cold emails;
2.Using a recruiter for warm intros
3. Applying like everyone else but with a resume that is full of fabrications.
A common thread in many of his victim companies: he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
> Office politics comes after you land a job
You think? I'm extending the term to actually getting a job in "traditional" organizations. You already have to optimize for keywords etc, don't you? It's not human interaction but a "process".
> he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
But they got an "AI" engineer didn't they? Or no one in management could define what an "AI" engineer is?
Tbh I'd give the guy a high paying job, but in marketing.
Be competent and able to prove it. Work with in-demand tools - for me that's .NET, React, Azure, SQL dbs etc. For others it may be go, python, java, AWS, GCP whatever is in demand near you. Probably not Rust, C or C++ etc - I'm sure there's demand for that too but at least near me they're a lot rarer.
Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.
Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.
If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.
Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.
> He estimated that he was bringing in $30,000 to $40,000 per month
Doesn't sound like "extremely dire financial circumstances" to me...
Could be a gambling addiction
Maybe we don't need to take the word of a self-proclaimed fraudster at face value.
Yes. People like that are adept at making you feel for them.
He wasn't going for that, otherwise he would be more specific.
This looks like some sort of money sink he's ashamed to admit having. Might be gambling, might be porn. Whatever it is, it's not something he'll garner any compassion for.
That's a hell of a gambling addiction when he's making about 10 times what I am. You'd think you'd stop if you were just flushing that money down the toilet and not winning anything from the gambling
Well if you are winning money, you need to keep going as to not waste your lucky streak. If you are losing, you need to double down to win back what you lost. You need to keep going, as long as you do, the loses are not real, you can still turn it around. You need to play one more game. One more. You don't want to face she consequences of your action, you are in too deep. Your life will be ruined. There is no escape. It is to late to stop anyway, might as well keep playing.
Many people don't understand how serious gambling addictions is. It destroys families. I can be as bad as any drug related addiction if not worse.
Though that was just one guess. There are many money sinks. Porn, gacha games and so on.
About twenty years ago there was a story in Melbourne, of a young foreign student at the casino.
He withdrew $1,000 from the ATM from his home back in Asia. Was duly given the cash. He noticed though, that looking at online banking, his balance hadn't changed. Odd, but maybe it was a vagary of international transactions (and again, 20+ years ago).
Nope. So he took out another $1,000. And another. Every time, got the money, no transaction posted.
Not just one ATM, any.
Over the course of 2 years when it all came out, he had gotten $2M+ from this.
Know how he got caught? He took some of that money gambling. And sat at a table all night, constantly replenishing his stash. That tipped off the casino that something was odd, because they had loaded the ATM with $250K, which usually lasted ~48h, but he emptied out in a few. "Didn't we fill this this afternoon?".
Once they got the financial institutions it was also fairly quickly revealed.
And in court, the local banks admitted that there had been nothing flagged in their system, and presumably it would have kept working until (at least) his card expired.
There you have a literal money printing machine, and "No, let's see what I can win gambling". I suppose here's other factors like "Maybe it's easier to launder a big winning" but nonetheless, it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling.
> it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling
Presumably he expected the jig to go up eventually and be asked to return the money; if his gambling was successful he could've returned the money and avoid any trouble, essentially having made his winnings on credit.
I read through one of his emails. This guy is great at communicating his interest and signaling himself as a "high performer".
Perhaps, he is also genuinely good at cracking these interviews. No wonder, he's been through so many of them.
this email? https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745
That's a particularly terrible cold email, you can tell he didn't even bother applying some basic personalisation to it outside of [COMPANY_NAME]
Nutshell: Toxic founders who want developers to code 24X7 may hired him seeing this.
Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.
I suspect (and have seen some evidence) that the interviews he aced were algo-based. Doing well in these is very repeatable, with low additional effort. Behavioural are much harder to do at scale.
US companies are afraid of litigations or European labour laws (irrelevant if you hire a contractor) but will not hesitate to hire questionable people from 3rd world countries for about the same pay like they would europeans.
That's bonkers.
Solution: lie and pretend you're in India and relocating to the US. /s
This is insane, there is a Reddit, of course there is, of almost 500K people, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ , who discuss all of the strategies to do this.
Just imagine being one of the people who legit joins a startup, is passionate, working long hours, earning your vest, to have your coworker pretending to be working.
The VPs, heads of, and C levels of most of the companies I have worked for were also pretending to be working. They knew the company wasn’t profitable, they gave a couple of advices here and there, and then left the company. Big pay checks. Now they are doing the same all over again in other companies.
Tired of considering this “normal” and nobody talking about it. But when one simple engineer does it, well, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, yada yada.
Get real. There's a difference between a self-proclaimed fraudster and an ineffectual executive. In intention, if not in effect.
In as much as there is a difference between a performing magician and one who shows you how a trick is done maybe
Every manager and employer should skim through that subreddit. When I stumbled onto it I felt like Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense, where the truth was revealed and every flashback moment suddenly made sense and lined up. Until then, things just felt “off” but it was hard to put a finger on what was actually going on.
I guess impromptu Slack huddles work for quickly finding this out in the first weeks...
There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.
When people with no integrity or ethics defraud their employers, "it's life"?
How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.
but these people attend too many meetings; the OE ones miss everything.
Anecdotally I'd argue that it's not just "plenty", but the majority of people who only work one single job barely and/or pretend to work. I regularly see Principal+ engineers, VPs and Directors waddling around looking important or just staring at their monitors with a glazed over look.
Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, why not dedicate the remaining 20 hours to another corp, and double your comp? Everyone wins.
HackerNews dudes claiming they do a true minimum 40 hours per week, every week, forever, of heads-down hard-work are deluding themselves. I really don't understand the overemployment hatred this forum has. There are plenty of folks who really do solid work at 2+ jobs, not half-assing and politicking.
Disclaimer: I am not OE.
This is why there’s a push to the four day workweek. People get just as much done, they just use their time more efficiently.
Taking current state of Reddit, with all the rage-bait and other sorts of creative writing, I wonder how much of that is legit content.
We interviewed him. He actually had solid full-stack skills. But it was obvious he had other stuff going on. Hence, we didn't take him.
How was it obvious?
Reminded me of this guy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589
I wonder... did any of those simultaneous jobs consider him a bad performer?
Did any of those simultaneous jobs even have someone who could evaluate their technical employees based on what they do and not signaling?
What I don't understand is why he updated his public profiles with all those simultaneous jobs..
Yes. He'd commit code once a week or so, and then make excuses on why he couldn't do more. They're fire him after a couple months, and by then, he'd have gotten the money.
My understanding from what I saw on twitter about this yesterday was that a number of the companies that did hire him ended up firing him very quickly soon after, I think
He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing
The Wolf of YC Street.
You the phrase about how when something becomes a metric it ceases to be a useful measure because everyone starts gaming it?
The same goes for hiring tricks. When some hiring signal becomes a trick that gets passed around by influencers, it ceases to become a useful hiring signal because everyone is gaming it.
If this guy started advertising his process, everyone would start doing his process and it would stop working.
You can proselytize all you want for thousands of years and you will never convert the whole world at once.
Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.
Exactly my thoughts after listening to founders saying he crushes all the interviews.
who says he isn't
I don’t know him, but I did once have a staff member who was kind of the same. Nothing ever got delivered, their dad, mum, aunty, grandmother was always in hospital. They never came into the office. They always had their camera off. When they did do something, it was brilliant but they only produced stuff when questions were being asked. Other staff would cover for him as sort of an unspoken rule.
I would imagine that a lot of the job background check processes can be somewhat fuzzy - it's too much time and too unreliable to try asking actual startups if someone is employed there currently, particularly outside of the US, and it wouldn't even really tell you what you wanted to know if someone is saying they'll leave their current job for you.
(Hell, every so often various companies randomly decide that I and someone with almost the same full name as I are the same person, even without that person ever having had an account with the company, and then it's a pain to straighten it out because they all claim they have no insight into where those black box systems pull this information...yes, I'm really quite sure that I did not have a lease on this kind of car before I was born.)
Doubly so, I imagine, if you're not in the US, depending on whether you're an actual FTE or a contractor or what.
I find it hard to be sympathetic to the companies though, really - given how quickly the organizations that love to use family metaphors and imagery to describe their culture will drop people if it's inconvenient for the company, I don't think they get to cry foul on someone thinking they're entitled to the work as promised and nothing else.
The problem is YC is the guild of copycats
If you write something for one startup, you can use it in other startups too
So, some people like him fit easily for them all
Related links that have been posted in other threads. Others?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/who-is-soham-parekh-the-se...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/man-goes-viral-working...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWMngMm3_88
How come all the companies that hired him are "X but with AI"? Any several state he "aced" their algo-focused interviews. That's like winning a long drive contest; it doesn't mean you're good at golf.
I wonder if he's spending all the time optimizing for interviews & interviewing than actually working. I guess that's what you get if you make the interview process so terrible that only a full-time interviewer (as opposed to real employee) can pass it.
What is the difference between this and leadership being in the committees, boards and executive seats of multiple companies?
Why is it the social expectation that an IC must devote 100% of their time and energy to the operations of a single company, when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?
IME, employees are on committees and boards (though not public company boards all that often) all the time. The issue here taking multiple full time positions. A CEO being the CEO of multiple companies at once is not common, and when it does happen it tends to draw a lot of scrutiny. CEO is considered a full time job, showing up to a board meeting every quarter is not.
The second part of this is disclosure, which was not done in this case.
One particular CEO in the news is at the head of 3 companies
"at the head" of large - especially publicly traded - companies is not the same as trying to run all aspects of the day-to-day. It also rarely (ever?) happens when they don't have a big ownership stake, or are there primarily as a figurehead.
We can debate if the executive timeline is too short and that's what destroys companies, but I don't see how this is the same as an over-employed engineer who's spread too thin.
Many would argue that, indeed, said public CEO is spread too thin.
Incidentally, why aren't there more part time positions?
Probably because said leadership would then be unable to keep their employees in meetings since they're supposed to do some actual work once in a while.
At the C-suite level, I'm noticing more "fractional" positions, which — as far as I can tell — is a fancier way of saying part time. (This may be the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon at work, though.)
Maybe there are more than you think? Some companies are willing to do reduced time even if it isn't explicitly listed on the offer.
> Incidentally, why aren't there more part time positions?
It is obviously easier to manage a small group of people who work full-time than a larger group of people who work part-time. So, if there does not exist a strong wish for part-time positions from the employees, few will be created.
Also, a lot of employees are there "for the money". So getting paid much worse for a part-time position is considered to be the worse deal by many employees.
Go ask wait staff or warehouse workers how much they like their part time jobs.
So why would you deny me the right to hold several part time contracts instead of a full time "job"? I'm not in those industries.
because the overhead of a PT or fractional employee is just about as much as a FT one, and why should I give you 100% attention when you only want to give me 50%?
It is not about denying but showcasing that it might not be as beneficial as you somehow believe.
I'm speaking for myself. I like having several part time contracts more than one full time job.
Of course, that only goes for IT if done remotely.
That's no reason to throw seasonal warehouse jobs at me as a counterexample.
He is not in their social class. The rules for the peasants don't apply to the lords.
The difference is pretty explicit in the terms and conditions? By the way, there are also leadership positions with similar limitations on your ability to take outside roles.
Interesting. So elon's terms and conditions says he's a part-time employee?
> when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?
This is extremely rare; generally a CxO is a full-time job. Elon Musk is a notable exception, and, ah, it doesn't seem to be going _great_. Being a _board_ member isn't usually a significant time commitment.
when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview
It is kind of tiring for me to read people equating "Elon Musk" with "all those rich guys being CEOs".
When you really are a business owner OFTEN you have to devote 120% of your time and energy for running the company and single one.
People you see on TV flying private jets to expensive holiday destinations are not your average business owners. Elon and the likes are the exception not the norm.
You've answer your own question. If you are hired to work full-time you are expected to do that (as per your contract). If you are on a board or committee the expectation is a number of hours per month.
But fulltime is a contract thing (at least here) and defined by 40 hrs a week. In my country 32-36 in contracts is also called fulltime. So after those hours, I did my fulltime and now you do not own me until the next 40 hours. Unless working for competitors currently here you cannot make valid contracts to prevent it either.
However, if you are in the EU, then all your employers are jointly responsible for ensuring that your collective working hours don't breach the Working Time Directive, which means 48 hours as the maximum average working week, calculated over a 4-month period, across all employers (excluding certain statutory roles like seamen, law enforcement, and military).
There are contractual terms, including things that are likely to be conflict of interests or impact performance. And depending on jurisdiction there are also laws on working hours: 48 hours max. per week on average in the UK and EU across all jobs (it is possible to opt out) and with minimum rest times. Because employers can be held liable, if they find out they won't let you.
The comment I was replying to does not make sense.
>What is the difference between this and leadership being in the committees
That this involved lying to your employers. There is no social expectation that you only work one job, plenty of people work multiple jobs, but there is a social expectation that you do what you said you'd do, and it turns out you have a bit of a mathematical problem if you try to work 4 eight hour jobs in a 24 hour day.
Which is, as per the article, how he was caught. Turns out if you call in sick at one place and then push code to github for your other jobs most employers aren't paying you for that.
Please. Employers are going after the your last drop of blood. The only reason that’s socially accepted is because they have the power to do so, and because it has been like that since ever. You make one mistake and you’re fired (sometimes even you’re fired randomly); the company is not earning as much as last year? Layoffs! AI can do part of your job? Layoffs!
It’s silly and servant-like to think you are in an equal-to-equal position when dealing with a company and that you cannot dedicate your time to other endeavors just because they wrote that in a paper. If it turns out that they don’t like how you perform while doing multiple jobs, they will fire you, just like they will fire you even if you work just for them.
Employment contract is a contract and usually it's fixed hours per workday for a salary. So basically you as employee swap X hours per Y amount of money.
If one of the parties is in breach of that contract it's normal it to be dissolved. If you don't want to work, you don't need to sign that contract.
The really moral part of free market economy is that both parties are voluntary entering a contract. You as a person sell your skilled time, the company buys your skilled time. If you have super unique skills, like Andrej Karpathy you sell something on the market that is very valuable and you have the upper hand. If you know "Microsoft Excel" I'd bet there are many people (or AI agents) that will do the same and what you're selling can be bought in many places (and time zones).
Basic microeconomics... In a free market you need to do something for the others to have something for you. And if it's not useful, they won't pay you for that.
I'm in an equal to equal position to not sign any contract I don't like. What is it with this whiny attitude in this industry? We're talking specifically about software engineers. The guy worked four six figure jobs raking in 40 grand a month and didn't show up to work. Can we stop pretending we're oppressed workers because we have to show up from 9-5, Jesus.
The moral of the story is that the current interviewing process is easy to cheat for people like him.
Rather, since by basic economy markets are controlled by incentives:
He is the kind of person that companies actually want. (Otherwise these companies would have set up a different interviewing process (i.e. different incentives)).
:-)
People like him are going to accelerate the death of remote/hybrid roles
A handful of comments already alluded to it, but maybe YC startups aren’t as smart as they think they are when they are looking for their founding engineers. Especially when it’s just the two founders looking for find their early engineers and the one holding the mba is the one leading/hiring. East to dupe these folks early on?
Honestly feels like the whole Soham Parekh thing on Twitter is one giant joke with the one sincere / honest remark being the original from @Suhail.
Like, I can't wrap my head around this many people having some kind of experience with a single guy who's claim to be fame is basically gaming the interview process at an incredible amount of Y Combinator startups.
Yeah, I'm surprised someone who's been working at over 50 companies in only 3 years wasn't caught sooner. Some of the stories are wild enough that they had to have been shared with others at the time.
Founders don't like to go around advertising that they got tricked by a scammer. They're trying to impress everyone and raise money. Telling the whole world that you got scammed is not a good look.
This seems to highlight how broken the hiring process is at these companies. I guess this is what you get when you want to leet code your candidates.
Looks like he has cracked the hiring playbook. I wouldn't be surprised if Zuck came forward and said they also hired SP for their ASI team.
No surprise, it's all about the cloud driven interview.
Seriously, a good programmer cares about good abstraction, not the correct cloud setup.
Those startups are worth the scam, it's skill issue all the way down.
All anecdotes I see about this dude is: "we hired him and he did a fantastic job, but once we found out he had multiple employment we fired him".
... why? If the guy's doing well by all metrics and not leaking IP, literally, who cares?
Wrong. Many anecdotes say, "He was scamming us in the first week."
This shouldn't come as a revelation, but it's risky to employ people of low character. There's the risk of theft, lawsuits, etc – not to mention, nobody needs the frustration of dealing with lies and flakiness.
We had a guy like that... the thing is you cannot really pass any responsibility on him because he will eventually be distracted with other stuff. You will never know when you have him 100%. You don't want to keep checking on your employees week by week day by day, if they deliver.
You need some degree of trust in your employees (you cannot "verify" all the time), and you cannot trust some guy you KNOW is cheating on you.
None of the anecdotes I saw say that.
All of them say he did good work when he was working, but it was obvious that he was trying to do it as a part-time job.
I saw several anecdotes that were: “when he did the job, it was great, but he rarely did the job because there was always someone sick, meeting with a lawyer, or any excuse to not deliver”.
So I think that finding about multiple employment is actually about realizing he was lying the whole time with the excuses.
He's not going to get much sympathy. Because:
1) from the employer side, this runs afoul of all MBA theory and practice, so he could have been more profits. Almost by definition, this means you're not getting the maximum out of the guy. Oh and there's jealousy of course.
2) from employee's side, this runs afoul of union thinking. Those jobs could have employed 5 people, maybe more. Oh and there's jealousy of course.
Lots of YC companies copy each other process and selection criteria. Basically- they all have the same blind spots and look for the same type of engineer.
So, super easy to scam all of them with the same skillset and mannerism.
This guy, and guys like him, are the reason why it's such a pain to do legit business in the modern world.
Try getting a code signing certificate, opening a bank account for a new business or listing an app on the App Store. You'll quickly see the effects of this kind of behavior.
This guy should be absolutely ostracized.
[Edit: not to mention the countless brilliant Indian software devs for whom he just directly put Silicon Valley out of reach.]
Ostracized? I don’t know. If the companies he works for are happy enough with his output, then what’s wrong? What’s silly is that we have to work for 40 years to afford a living place that can hardly accommodate you and your family. What’s silly is that you have executives earning 5 times what you earn jumping from company to company and doing nothing but maximizing their own profits. So, yeah, fuck companies. He guy is playing the game the best he can, and if any company doesn’t like his output they can just fire him.
They did!
>This guy should be absolutely ostracized.
But it's funny. And people who make you laugh, even if naughty, get a pass.
Except this is exactly the same thing that businesses constantly do to their employees and customers.
Because why would you expect startup hiring process to be good?
Bigger question is do you think he really wants everyone on the Internet targeting him one way or another?
Why didn't he get the option to remain an anonymous scandal?
We don't need to know his name to discuss his actions.
The purpose of sharing his name was to warn other companies, not to discuss the story.
That’s an excuse for poor behavior.
Relevant people can share it privately and put out a public warning about obviously noticeable behavioral patterns.
Couple issues here:
1) Sharing it wide open on the Web for the whole world to see and everyone to poke fun of is a massive intrusion.
2) It's also a gateway to bunch of nonsense and false information all over the Internet. Half the stuff I see about this person under allegations, I just don't trust. Not to mention all of a sudden there are tens of impersonators.
3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
All this is happening too close to people openly talking about what AI researchers are being traded on every social media platform. Idk if any of these people ever wanted to be so famous.
> 1) Sharing it wide open on the Web for the whole world to see and everyone to poke fun of is a massive intrusion.
If this person had done a single violation I'd agree. He's a serial manipulator, though, and he's been scamming people throughout the startup community. Once your behavior starts becoming a problem for a community, you shouldn't expect that community to also protect your identity.
The person was targeting a startup community (YC) and had learned how to game their system. The person posting the info didn't even post it immediately. They posted it a year later after hearing multiple stories of the person continuing to do it.
> 3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
There's a photo of him right in the thread specifically so people can determine if they're talking about the same person. He was also highlighted on a Meta open source developer blog a few years ago.
We all know people can have similar names.
That’s great I don’t trust anything that’s said about him because it’s publicized.
I’m not even sure if this guy is real or a made up story to poke fun at YC community.
Either way, I’m not losing sleep over it.
Just letting all of you know that someone’s always watching
It just shows how most startups don't have a good vetting system in place.
TLDR: Tech has cargo-culted the interview process and people are gaming the system based on that interview process.
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https://thesohamparekh.com/
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