Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44448461

by jshchnz • 1 year ago

319 419 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

revskill• 1 year ago

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.

robswc3• 1 year ago

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?

robswc3• 1 year ago

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.

deepsun3• 1 year ago

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.

mistrial9• 1 year ago

age

gk15• 1 year ago

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.

crossroadsguy• 1 year ago

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 :-)

ReptileMan• 1 year ago

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.

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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?

bibek_poudel• 1 year ago

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.

mathiaspoint• 1 year ago

Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.

skeeter20209• 1 year ago

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.

ninetyninenine• 1 year ago

IQ tests are also distinct skills but IQ scores are the most quantifiable and studied numbers in all of psychology and correlate with all kinds of things like job performance.

I think the purpose of the interview is the same thing. Even though there's no strong evidence for a correlation it's reasonable to believe intuitively that there is.

alpb• 1 year ago

this email? https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745

mpeg3• 1 year ago

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]

ATechGuy• 1 year ago

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.

jasonthorsness• 1 year ago

He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing

occamsrazorwit3• 1 year ago

Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.

godelmachine• 1 year ago

The Wolf of YC Street.

sathish316• 1 year ago

Leetcode me if you can

__turbobrew__2• 1 year ago

The Davinci Leetcode

thisisit• 1 year ago

Exactly my thoughts after listening to founders saying he crushes all the interviews.

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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.

kjkjadksj3• 1 year ago

You can proselytize all you want for thousands of years and you will never convert the whole world at once.

asdf69695• 1 year ago

Not true or else leetcode would be gone. They made a lot of money off the old paradigm and somebody will certainly take advantage of whatever comes next

seydor• 1 year ago

who says he isn't

jm20• 1 year ago

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.

meistertigran• 1 year ago

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.

darth_aardvark• 1 year ago

How do you explain multiple places with in office work corroborating that he came into the office?

jonathan-adly• 1 year ago

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.

dazzeloid5• 1 year ago

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)

robswc3• 1 year ago

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.

dazzeloid5• 1 year ago

funny thing was he had other places on his linkedin under "active employment" but we never really dug into it (until we learned he was full-time there) because he just seemed like the kind of person who wouldn't keep his LinkedIn up to date.

the_real_cher4• 1 year ago

Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?

deepsun3• 1 year ago

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.

avmich• 1 year ago

Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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.

dazzeloid5• 1 year ago

trust. he was not forthcoming when confronted with the "this other company says you are full-time and just went to their offsite - is that true?"

nickip• 1 year ago

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?

FootballBat2• 1 year ago

All I hear is "really good at interviewing."

thepasswordis• 1 year ago

The people assessing his talent are falling for the same delusion as the people conducting the interview.

icedchai2• 1 year ago

Perhaps he's talented at interviewing? Turns out this is the only skill you really need...

StackRanker30002• 1 year ago

worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job

chanux2• 1 year ago

https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/pol/fraud/resistance.html

dazzeloid5• 1 year ago

mid-level output, clearly had more capability than his output suggested from his ideas and some particularly strong contributions

nyarlathotep_3• 1 year ago

he's a really talented engineer, crushed our interviews.

Think it says a lot about this industry if "really talented 'engineer'" means passing loads of gamified interviews and not delivering things on time.

StackRanker30002• 1 year ago

But the person you’re responding to said he did a solid job for almost a year.

pwthornton4• 1 year ago

It seems to me a really talented engineer would deliver more than solid work, no?

mock-possum2• 1 year ago

Why bother, when you get the paid the same regardless?

I don’t know the guy, but I feel like a lot of people are missing this angle - just because you’re technically capable, doesn’t mean you’re actually motivated or that you actually bother to deliver. You can also be lazy and just collect your check.

tuckerpo2• 1 year ago

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?

spwa4• 1 year ago

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.

thomassmith652• 1 year ago

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.

ls-a6• 1 year ago

Then fire the CEOs, lawyers, investors, and top management with low character.

soneca• 1 year ago

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.

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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.

karel-3d• 1 year ago

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.

rpcorb4• 1 year ago

Wrong. Many anecdotes say, "He was scamming us in the first week."

suyash• 1 year ago

It just shows how most startups don't have a good vetting system in place.

ls-a6• 1 year ago

Leetcode interviews are a faang thing

rincebrain• 1 year ago

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.

gargoyle9123• 1 year ago

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.

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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.

gyomu• 1 year ago

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?

snthpy3• 1 year ago

Do employment contracts in the US not normally have "sole focus" clauses? We have those in my location.

gk15• 1 year ago

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

FootballBat2• 1 year ago

Employment contracts in the US are rare.

icedchai2• 1 year ago

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.

hilux2• 1 year ago

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.

samgranieri• 1 year ago

I think these might soon be called Soham clauses, to be a bit cheeky.

roll20• 1 year ago

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

dragonwriter4• 1 year ago

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.

anon_22222• 1 year ago

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?

anukin• 1 year ago

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.

maxnevermind• 1 year ago

What type of interview you have, I presume non LeetCode style?

commandersaki• 1 year ago

I'm intrigued by this guy, he could only have a few years of experience. What does he have to show for it resume wise? Has he ever built something, oversaw a large project, contributed meaningfully - and does he back this well in his interviewing?

NameForComment• 1 year ago

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.

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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.

mkipper• 1 year ago

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?

sbmthakur• 1 year ago

With due respect, they probably just asked leetcode-esque and sys design questions.

hooloovoo_zoo• 1 year ago

The had 100 candidates and hired him. Top 1% QED. (/s)

pailhead2• 1 year ago

This.

mpeg3• 1 year ago

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.

sorcerer-mar2• 1 year ago

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.

msgodel3• 1 year ago

Lol because foreigners aren't known for being scammers.

aristofun• 1 year ago

he's actually a very skilled engineer

By that you mean more like "he is top 0.1% at leetcode and whatever broken hiring process we have" ?

Why would really top 0.1% engineer go for all the hustle with small startups. If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?

This doesn't add up at all, sorry.

aleph_minus_one7• 1 year ago

If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?

There is a high risk that the AI bubble will collapse.

ivape• 1 year ago

Well. Was George Santos an anomaly or proving of a hypothesis? If the hypothesis were structured like so:

If we have a pile of shit, surely shit eaters will be attracted to it

In which case George Santos is just a very testable hypothesis (it's like watching a 5 year old walk up to a cookie jar when the adults are gone). Congress attracts a certain type. What did you attract and why is an unavoidable question. In fact, it's scientific. You would think tech people would recognize the locust of non technical people entering the industry as some kind of an indicator, some measurable thing ...

We need to run more formal scientific experiments to document what happened in this industry.

moralestapia• 1 year ago

Source: anonymous account created one day ago.

aprdm• 1 year ago

Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates

How do you measure that ? It seems like he wasn't a good candidate after all. I hope y`all learn a lesson about hiring and moving away from things that aren't signal to a job.

wanderlust1233• 1 year ago

What was your interview process like? I think that would be helpful information in helping design a better vetting procedure to avoid this in the future.

AndrewKemendo• 1 year ago

This is what we call a hustler.

Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t, but keeping the myth going even if it comes with bad stories is valuable.

burnt-resistor4• 1 year ago

Like a cheater and a jerk. Doesn't matter how talented someone is, if they're too arrogant, then the no *sshole rule means they must adapt to expectations or find somewhere else.

If they're so talented, then they should probably work on their own thing.

msgodel3• 1 year ago

I'm worried people are going to start going after burnt out employees thinking they're over employed because it looks the same from the outside and there's no way to prove a negative.

I don't think anyone has the morals or trust anymore for the way we used to do corporate work.

sugarpimpdorsey• 1 year ago

I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer.
Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.

People who regularly don't show up for work are by definition not "top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates" - in fact quite the opposite.

That'll get you fired from PetSmart, let alone some bullshit $250k/yr software job.

I think startups' freewheeling management and hiring practices need examined because this would be caught by the most basic of background or reference checks at any traditional business.

Can't wait for Paul Graham's next essay on "How to Not Hire People Who Smoke Crack In the Toilets Instead of Showing Up for Work" for more informative life lessons.

swores3• 1 year ago

You're replying to a quote about where their skill falls compared to others, and then saying it's wrong based on their contribution to the company. You're not wrong that it means they aren't top 1% in terms of value as an employee, but it's a separate topic to the quote you're replying to.

pluto_modadic• 1 year ago

A disinterested Richard Feynman is a better physicist than a very interested highschooler. Skill and value extraction are not the same thing.

horns4lyfe• 1 year ago

This field would be so much better off good engineering meant being good at following through on projects instead of being good at gaming interviews.

ioncannon• 1 year ago

Do companies not call references or former places of employment anymore? I am surprised he kept the scam so long when these jobs could've just called his previous work who'd tell them a story like you said.

DWBH• 1 year ago

Maybe Earth could stop policing entire populations (a very profitable enterprise) of various ecosystems and return to policing the small percentage of the population that abuses the ecosystem for their own selfish gain? Generally, a small percentage of any population abuses the ecosystem and creates restrictions for the population as a whole. Fix THAT problem, and you solve a myriad of other related problems for entire populations. Character questions are forbidden in the USA as they might lead to 'discrimination.' But 'discrimination' is where one discerns a preference between something desirable and something undesirable? Historically the abuse of 'discrimination' created the legal restrictions that foster this situation where a candidate's character cannot be assessed accurately. Soham proves that the people doing the interviewing are less discerning than they believe themselves to be. Good character seldom is discerned during an interview. Also 'good' character relative; what 'Christians' or 'Westerners' consider to be good character is different from what other cultures accept or tolerate. In summary, caveat emptor.

baceituno• 1 year ago

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.

agnishom• 1 year ago

How was it obvious?

Bjorkbat• 1 year ago

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.

occamsrazorwit3• 1 year ago

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.

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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.

data_yum_yum3• 1 year ago

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.

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

The purpose of sharing his name was to warn other companies, not to discuss the story.

data_yum_yum3• 1 year ago

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.

eviks2• 1 year ago

Because why would you expect startup hiring process to be good?

ReD_CoDE• 1 year ago

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

dalemhurley3• 1 year ago

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.

dalemhurley3• 1 year ago

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.

KeplerBoy• 1 year ago

There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.

tuckerpo2• 1 year ago

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.

skeeter20209• 1 year ago

but these people attend too many meetings; the OE ones miss everything.

rpcorb4• 1 year ago

When people with no integrity or ethics defraud their employers, "it's life"?

gk15• 1 year ago

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.

swah• 1 year ago

I guess impromptu Slack huddles work for quickly finding this out in the first weeks...

dakiol2• 1 year ago

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.

rpcorb4• 1 year ago

Get real. There's a difference between a self-proclaimed fraudster and an ineffectual executive. In intention, if not in effect.

timeon• 1 year ago

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.

cardanome10• 1 year ago

This makes no sense. The whole thing is idiotic. Seems to be a combination of LARP and some people trying to push a narrative.

If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.

ManlyBread3• 1 year ago

If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.

You won't earn more. I've considered that at one point and most adverts on freelance sites like Upwork are written by people who are either clueless or downright insane. These people usually want you to create a completely new system from scratch using technologies of their choosing and the offers are like $8-$15 per hour or $800 for work that is supposed to take months to complete. Why would anyone want to agree to do that when apparently getting steady paychecks from multiple companies is an option?

chanux2• 1 year ago

to have your coworker pretending to be working.

I don't think this is uncommon.

BeFlatXIII3• 1 year ago

That makes you the sucker.

dalemhurley3• 1 year ago

For trusting people to fulfil their employment contract?

What is the alternative, micromanage and monitor everyone? I am in the camp I want to trust people, especially highly skilled and highly paid employees.

confidantlake2• 1 year ago

How many of those are bots? How many are teenagers? How many are playing pretend? 90% would be a conservative estimate.

madamelic2• 1 year ago

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.

Why.

I have worked in VC-backed startups for over a decade. The individual employee isn't going to change the direction of the company regardless of how hard they work.

The people who make or break the startup are the founders. Even the middle managers do not matter. If the founders / top level leaders have no idea what they are doing and do not want to make money, nothing a single engineer does even matters.

The best thing an engineer can do in that scenario is give advice and do work as prescribed. Trying to save the founders from themselves is a recipe for going crazy and burning out.

the2ndfloorguy• 1 year ago

https://thesohamparekh.com/

leovander• 1 year ago

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?

jsbg• 1 year ago

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

Aurornis12• 1 year ago

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.

oldgradstudent• 1 year ago

But they haven't checked his employment eligibility or he wouldn't have started his first week.

Nextgrid3• 1 year ago

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.

anshumankmr• 1 year ago

People like him are going to accelerate the death of remote/hybrid roles

mathverse• 1 year ago

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.

Nextgrid3• 1 year ago

Solution: lie and pretend you're in India and relocating to the US. /s

__turbobrew__2• 1 year ago

There are places where pretending to be Indian will help you get a job. Just make sure you choose a good last name.

saejox• 1 year ago

I can't even find one job. What's his secret?

Zealotux• 1 year ago

He perfected the hiring game, probably automated fake activity on his GitHub, lied on his resume, among other things: https://leaderbiography.com/soham-parekh/

meander_water• 1 year ago

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

nottorp6• 1 year ago

He was good at the office politics kabuki. Wore the right masks and all.

ayewo• 1 year ago

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.

sfn423• 1 year ago

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.

oh_fiddlesticks• 1 year ago

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?

mytailorisrich2• 1 year ago

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.

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

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.

nottorp6• 1 year ago

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.

aleph_minus_one7• 1 year ago

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.

Lyngbakr2• 1 year ago

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.)

ozim3• 1 year ago

Go ask wait staff or warehouse workers how much they like their part time jobs.

account422• 1 year ago

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.

asdf69695• 1 year ago

There aren’t formal part time positions but there’s a lot of jobs that only occupy half your full time and don’t ask questions when you disappear for a few hours

matwood• 1 year ago

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.

killingtime742• 1 year ago

One particular CEO in the news is at the head of 3 companies

eviks2• 1 year ago

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.

killingtime742• 1 year ago

Interesting. So elon's terms and conditions says he's a part-time employee?

Barrin922• 1 year ago

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.

tkiolp44• 1 year ago

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.

ozim3• 1 year ago

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.

jen203• 1 year ago

Musk isn’t even the first person I thought of here (it was Jack Dorsey).

rsynnott• 1 year ago

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.

confidantlake2• 1 year ago

He is not in their social class. The rules for the peasants don't apply to the lords.

altairprime5• 1 year ago

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.

liotier• 1 year ago

eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have

Lol - you don't have enough hobbies.

altairprime5• 1 year ago

Turns out I prefer some of my hobbies to benefit other people’s goals, which is often sated by employment.

mock-possum2• 1 year ago

Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I was bored as an adult - the times I was bored as a kid, it was because adults were making be somewhere or do something that wasn’t engaging.

I literally have a computer at hand 24/7 now, I’m almost never bored. It’s kinda crazy to think about much of a change that is.

freefaler3• 1 year ago

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.

__s• 1 year ago

They said 18 waking hours, not working hours

altairprime5• 1 year ago

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.

NegativeK2• 1 year ago

I've never seen that perspective.

Work has always been a distraction from my hobbies. _Always_. Sometimes they're related, but often they're not.

Though... Your stance lines up with people who work well into their retirement years while not needing the income? I'd struggle to give two weeks notice if I suddenly had enough money to live on for the rest of my life.

hiAndrewQuinn• 1 year ago

I like work because work provides value for other people. I don't like hobbies because hobbies provide value only to myself, and I am already worth enough as I am. What's there not to get?

nottorp6• 1 year ago

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..

VoidWhisperer• 1 year ago

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

iamwil• 1 year ago

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.

voidUpdate2• 1 year ago

He estimated that he was bringing in $30,000 to $40,000 per month

Doesn't sound like "extremely dire financial circumstances" to me...

cardanome10• 1 year ago

Could be a gambling addiction

baobabKoodaa• 1 year ago

Maybe we don't need to take the word of a self-proclaimed fraudster at face value.

voidUpdate2• 1 year ago

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

dev_l1x_be• 1 year ago

The moral of the story is that the current interviewing process is easy to cheat for people like him.

aleph_minus_one7• 1 year ago

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)).

:-)

andai• 1 year ago

Reminded me of this guy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589

twright• 1 year ago

The date on that post says a lot more about the state of hiring in ‘21-22 than overemployment (though 10 is a ridiculous amount). Everyone was over-hiring, ZIRP, etc. Then the music stopped in ‘23 and almost everyone was laid off.

piker• 1 year ago

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.]

tkiolp44• 1 year ago

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.

imron• 1 year ago

They did!

v5v33• 1 year ago

This guy should be absolutely ostracized.

But it's funny. And people who make you laugh, even if naughty, get a pass.

account422• 1 year ago

Except this is exactly the same thing that businesses constantly do to their employees and customers.

tkiolp44• 1 year ago

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.

Lyngbakr2• 1 year ago

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?

tkiolp44• 1 year ago

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.

distances• 1 year ago

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.

cardanome10• 1 year ago

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.

Havoc• 1 year ago

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

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

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?

The eu contracts I've had (and seen) usually restrict you working for competitors. Never seen one that actually promotes 'rest', as a restriction on unpaid time.

jxjnskkzxxhx2• 1 year ago

Could you give me an example of these non demanding jobs? Just so I get sense of the type of company you mean.

Tade02• 1 year ago

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.

swader999• 1 year ago

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.

ldjkfkdsjnv2• 1 year ago

people above and around you prefer if you stay within the range. over performing stresses other people out and causes conflict.

lazyeye• 1 year ago

https://reddit.com/r/overemployed

https://youtu.be/IWMngMm3_88

surajrmal• 1 year ago

Your definition of common is likely not the same as most people's. If this even broke 1 in a thousand I would be in awe. Most folks can't even keep up with their single job and life (family obligations and what not). Managing multiple is not something that will cross their mind.

BeFlatXIII3• 1 year ago

For most of us, our J2 is chatting on Hacker News. These guys make it pay.

mlloyd• 1 year ago

THIS. Companies establish the minimum level of productivity acceptable by keeping the lowest performer. There's very little benefit in producing much beyond that level in most organizations. What do you do with all the extra time if you're a superstar? You could give it to your employer for free or sell it on the open market by acquiring another job and profiting off your own performance.

bestthrowaway• 1 year ago

That's an interesting way to put it. I was overemployed from 2021 to 2024. I worked two full-time start-up jobs (well, a W2 job and a full-time contract position that was for all intents and purposes a full-time W2 job, just that it paid me without the deductions and such). When one company shut down, I continued doing contract work but not at a full-time capacity.

During my tenure at both companies, my higher-ups liked my performance so much that when it was time to select people for raises/promotions/rate increases etc, I was among the few selected. I took this as a sign that my half-performance was valued enough to earn me more money so I wanted to stay like this forever. Alas, it didn't.

I'm extremely fortunate that everyone was pretty flexible. If I couldn't make a daily standup (or whatever regular meeting), I'd just say I can't make it and no one would ask why. Same if I had to leave a meeting early. As long as I got my stuff done, no one complained.

And really, that's what I appreciated the most. I'd happily work for either single one of these companies simply because they just respected everyone's time and treated everyone like adults. I acknowledge that I was technically taking advantage of this trust by working a separate job, but I cannot stress enough how happy my employers were with my half-performance. So as you mentioned, it's either give full-performance to one company for half-pay (or well, regular pay I guess), or give half-performance to two companies for double-pay. The economics made perfect sense, and because the companies felt good about the value they were getting from me for their money, I didn't feel guilty.

But it did make me think -- how many other people are giving full-performance to a company when half-performance would be satisfactory, if not exemplary? Especially now in the age of AI where many people are more productive than ever, why couldn't companies consider a full work-week 20 hours a week instead of 40, if they can still extract the same value? I think most individuals would be so much happier to work under those circumstances, and if they wanted to fill in the rest of the 20-hour week with another job they could, and not have to play this game.

I mean, the obvious answer is obvious, but a guy could dream.

dang• 1 year ago

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

skeeter20209• 1 year ago

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.

bmitc• 1 year ago

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.

jcadam• 1 year ago

Most US citizens applying for software engineering jobs can't even get a response to their resume, and then I read stories like this.

ldjkfkdsjnv2• 1 year ago

all the jobs are being outsourced is why

y-curious• 1 year ago

I'm hoping that the section 174 fix from the latest tax bill will slow this down significantly

nyarlathotep_3• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's really something to read this.

firstplacelast• 1 year ago

Hiring managers and HR area increasingly only open to unicorn candidates that have the exact amount of experience in the exact tech stack. While a few of those people exist, it's definitely more likely they end up interviewing people that are open to lying. So now your pipeline is filled with 90% liars, some just small white lies and others who have made a resume that has exclusively tailored lies just for your org.

The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.

Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.

CyanLite2• 1 year ago

TLDR: Tech has cargo-culted the interview process and people are gaming the system based on that interview process.

ls-a6• 1 year ago

TLDR: Low wages are backfiring

tropicalfruit• 1 year ago

this reminds me of dating apps

instead of all the women chasing the same guy

its all the companies chasing the same dev

soham is a chad

has hiring turned into tinder?

lifestyleguru• 1 year ago

The technologies aren't that groundbreaking after all. Resources on both side of supply and demand remain the same. There was no paradigm shit, no miraculous influx of extraordinary candidates. It's the illusion of choice creating the standoff. You have to lie and cheat to be considered a choice.

ungreased0675• 1 year ago

I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process. This guy is one more piece of evidence. He knew what hiring managers wanted to hear, and used that to get in the door.

My advice to companies is to stop chasing unicorns and 10x engineers. Intentionally try to hire ordinary average engineers. Your company making a SaaS app doesn’t need talented programmers, it just needs ordinary ones.

Ego leads founders to chase top 1% talent in some cases. In other cases the product is terrible but they think hiring an amazing programmer will pull them out of the dive. It won’t. Just hire normal people and build normally.

jrflowers• 1 year ago

I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process.

This is what makes this story so funny. A lot of people are mad at the guy that found an exploit in the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system without a lick of ire directed at the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system.

Like if everybody’s profile on a dating app said “only interested in talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger”, then somebody’s eventually going to get catfished by a fake Kindergarten Cop. It’s kind of a “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” situation

austin-cheney3• 1 year ago

No.

First of all we are developers only. Calling ourselves engineers is a sociopathic lie. Almost none of us are capable of doing anything that resembles engineering.

The problem with software is permissive tolerance of gross incompetence. I have been doing this for 20 years in the corporate world and can easily say 15% of the workforce knows what they are doing. The rest is reliant on other things to do it for them: open source applications, frameworks, toolkits, AI. The problem with industry wide incompetence is that solution delivery is slow, piecemeal, and extremely narrow in scope.

It really doesn’t take much to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x developer multiple times. It typically means I learn to do the full 8 hours worth of work in less than 2 hours so that I can play games all day. The work delivered tends to be far more durable and execute substantially faster so nobody asks many questions. It’s not that I’m smart. It’s that my peers just do the same stupid shit over and over without asking questions because they are getting by with imposter syndrome.

Employers need to occasionally hire a 10x developer otherwise they are going to be hiring outside firms to fill that gap.

anon_e-moose• 1 year ago

First of all we are developers only. Calling ourselves engineers is a sociopathic lie. Almost none of us are capable of doing anything that resembles engineering.

What if you did engineering before and just moved to software engineering because that somehow pays more than the noble profession of engineering?

markus_zhang2• 1 year ago

I have to say this treating other engineers as God attitude is really weird.

Other engineers make horrendous mistakes too. Other engineers just get by too.

If you think a piece of paper means really a lot, then so be it.

joshuanapoli2• 1 year ago

There is obviously some distribution of productivity in software developers. In young startups, a highly productive developer has an outsized impact. A delay in product development can mean the company is entirely blocked from advancing its growth. The cost of a “slow” developer can become the entire burn rate of the company, as everyone waits for X to be finished. A more productive developer has a better chance of staying ahead of the critical path.

Eisenstein2• 1 year ago

And how much delay is caused by waiting for that developer to show up and get hired?

davidgerard2• 1 year ago

One effect is a fresh set of eyes. When I started my last job I immediately reorganised a pile of stuff in useful ways just based on my previous job - which made up for not knowing anything about the local lay of the land as yet. It can give your first few months a real perception boost!

markus_zhang2• 1 year ago

My advice to companies who wants to hire 10x programmers is always:

Either pick someone inside who really wants the job, or find a brilliant new graduate who really wants the job.

It’s usually safer and cheaper.

isatty2• 1 year ago

The amount of people saying “yeah he’s a great engineer” with the only supporting piece of evidence being “he cracked our leetcode interviews” is bonkers.

ls-a6• 1 year ago

I wish he was never caught. The companies deserved that

lexarflash8g• 1 year ago

Realize that a lot of candidates who followed the rules and told the truth were screwed out of jobs. Right now there are massive layoffs and lots of good people are out of jobs and this guy is being praised by sticking it to “corporate greed”?

Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?

pwthornton4• 1 year ago

“He’s a great engineer.”

“Also, he never shipped anything good.”

Hiring is completely broken in a lot of tech. Getting the right companies on your resume early on — regardless of your skills — makes you a made person. And then if you know how to game interviews, you’ll be double made.

burnt-resistor4• 1 year ago

@sama's Triple Byte ostensibly tried to "solve" this and did nothing but make it worse. As a candidate, they lied to me saying "I had the 'best' score ever on their screening process". Ironically, I ended up at Meta where the interviewing process is somewhat like Google's but now even more difficult technically.

burnt-resistor4• 1 year ago

It's the surest signals of overrated candidates who lead with egos rather than results and an overrated hiring process with easily-fooled people who can't see it.

punkbit• 1 year ago

Do these teams know about version control? It’s quite simple to see who’s doing actual work and contributing…

Some claims he was brilliant, doing exactly what? Copying and pasting LLM output?

Did he participate in any hourly, daily technical conversations? Did he replied to others quick enough? Do these teams even know how to use slack, discord, etc? Are they having video meetings all the time and only person speaking like a podcast maybe?

u89012• 1 year ago

To anyone thinking this is the only hustle out there or this is uncommon, you've no idea what's really out there!

ls-a6• 1 year ago

Sounds like you're really bad at hiring. Paying low wages is backfiring at you

lumost• 1 year ago

Wouldn’t this be largely corrected by reference checks/letters in hiring? I’ve seen those becoming more frequent.

tabs_or_spaces• 1 year ago

I don't think anyone who hired him has any future credibility when it comes to hiring

* "He's a great engineer" - Yet he's ineffective at doing the job and touch fired him? * "He's top 0.1%" - Of what exactly? How can it be the case when you fired him?

You literally didn't do reference checks properly and you got caught out. And it's all written like these companies are the victims. You're better off admitting that you don't know how to hire.

Soham's behaviour is one thing, but working for any of these companies he was at is a literal red flag.

dhruv_xyz• 1 year ago

We hired him — and plenty of other great engineers after who didn’t pull his stunt.

You never really know what someone will do after they’re onboarded, even if they ace the interviews. When people say he’s a good engineer, they mean he crushed pair programming and skill tests. When he actually showed up, he did good work. Problem was he was juggling so many jobs he was always making excuses as to why he wasn't available. And he wasn’t upfront as to why.

We do reference checks. But when someone kills your interviews, you have to move fast or risk losing them to another offer. Time kills deals - and the best candidates usually get multiple offers. Waiting for every reference isn’t always an option. Most people are ethical, so you trade some risk for speed. In Soham’s case, one reference checked out, the other never replied. A few unaffiliated references said they remembered him from previous stops on the resume but hadn't worked with him directly.

If someone starts making excuses right away or seems off, it’s your job to cut them loose fast. Most companies did just that.

naveen99• 1 year ago

Reference not responding is a red flag.

moomoo11• 1 year ago

Yep. All these startups are probably shit.

jaimebuelta• 1 year ago

Interviewing is a skill. I think that he got really good at it, both in tailor his CV as well as the process itself. It probably worked on the process and make adjustments. Based on the what I’ve read, it seems that he was interviewing all the time.

So, IMHO, he focused in the interview process over everything else, including understanding and exploiting the blind spots. He iterated and refined it, until, he became a master of it.

He really seemed to be not great at the work itself, though. He was being fired after a couple of days, which I don’t think is common. You really have to do it very badly to be fired so quick after being hired.

Vaslo• 1 year ago

This is what happens at top consulting firms. Top 5% interview skills, especially as smoothing your way through a case study. But when they actually come consult for your business, it’s just not what you pay for given what you’ve been led to believe with those case studies.

talonx• 1 year ago

What I find disturbing here is the number of people who are supporting him saying that he is a victim of the system.

Irrespective of his skills or how broken the system is, dishonesty can never be condoned.

ai_assisted_dev• 1 year ago

People underestimate how widespread this actually is.

ralfcheung• 1 year ago

for companies who hired him and let him go, you should be reviewing your interview system. it looks like we are going back to old argument "coders who are good at interviews (most likely leetcode), but terrible at delivering actual work."

davidgerard2• 1 year ago

You must understand, these startup founders did extremely well on Raven's Progressive Matrices in grade school.

codemystery• 1 year ago

It's because in the leftist bay area tech scene, of which ycombinator is the absolute epicenter, no one does bias training. Among leftists, indians are the "model minority" and everyone is looking for an indian golden boy. You have no idea you are even doing it because you have implicit bias you are always crowing about. India is one of the poorest nations on earth and has many smart people, but there is an infatuation among the monied west coast left.

In a way the leftist tech scene has adopted eastern mysticism and shows how far california has moved from westernism. Hindu and Buddhism are religions that worship living humans and believe in divine incarnation. A young person might be a llama in hinduism or a tulku in buddhism. It's not to say that these tech startups are worshiping their newly discovered india programmer, but it is the culture that does not fall far from the tree.

bigfatkitten2• 1 year ago

The answer is that startups almost never do any meaningful personnel vetting.

That’s why they also keep hiring North Koreans.

stealthr3• 1 year ago

the issue is hiring processes do not verify what is on resume. ppl lie about even their education/degrees and what school they went talk less the company they worked at. Most people know companies do not verify any of those and background checks are usually about real name and criminal records only; they do not check employment history and education history.

Hint, start a company that does this and become the next unicorn overnight and help companies verify these right before offer stage. Good luck!!!

stealthr3• 1 year ago

did anyone see this? or was this censored?

stealthr3• 1 year ago

octo888• 1 year ago

How has this been #1 Ask HN for about a week, falling to #2 just after a week?

cgannett• 1 year ago

Would suck to be an honest dude who happens to share the same name right now.

northpoleescape• 1 year ago

Soham is ultimate scamster. What can you expect from people who are resource starved for centuries.

The real question is why did so many YC founder fell for his tricks? He is not even the US and he claimed he is coming over to so many companies?

All these people saying we hired him and he was good. No, he wasn't.

If he could scam about location and lie about so many thing, what makes you think he did not cheat during interviews?

He likely used cluely or some shit software like that to cheat.

A scam through and through.

Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?

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