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?
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?
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.
You just described why consulting makes big bucks
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?
> 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.
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 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.
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).
Employment contracts in the US are rare.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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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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
age
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.
Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.
this email? https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing
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.
Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.
The Wolf of YC Street.
Exactly my thoughts after listening to founders saying he crushes all the interviews.
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.
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
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.
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.
People like him are going to accelerate the death of remote/hybrid roles
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Because why would you expect startup hiring process to be good?
It just shows how most startups don't have a good vetting system in place.
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https://thesohamparekh.com/
/s
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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?