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

• revskill 1y 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.
• robswc 1y 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?
  • robswc 1y 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.
  • deepsun 1y 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 1y ago
      age
    • gk1 1y 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.
      • deepsun 1y ago
        Interesting, how do to that "freeze"? I thought it's all data brokers I don't have any leverage on.
        • gk1 1y ago
          https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
        • FireBeyond 1y ago
          You have to do it via a mailed-in form, but I did, and got a confirmation letter back. I haven't assessed the efficacy of it, but supposedly mine is.
  • crossroadsguy 1y 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 1y 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.
      • jen20 1y ago
        Last time I was in New York City I could not for the life of me find a paper copy of the New York Times to read. Newsstands appear to just be selling candy and drinks.
        • kaashif 1y ago
          You can get the New York Times and other newspapers in airports still. I do still buy a newspaper before a flight sometimes, but I actually shouldn't because flights have WiFi now. Irrational and nostalgic.
          • jen20 1y ago
            Yes - I know you can get them in airports (lounges often give them out for free) - I just thought it a little bizarre that I couldn't find a copy of the New York Times in midtown Manhattan!
  • Aurornis 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.
    • skeeter2020 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    this email? https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745 https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745
    • mpeg 1y 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]
      • sreekanth850 1y ago
• ATechGuy 1y 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 1y ago
  He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing
  • occamsrazorwit 1y ago
    Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.
  • godelmachine 1y ago
    The Wolf of YC Street.
    • sathish316 1y ago
      Leetcode me if you can
    • __turbobrew__ 1y ago
      The Davinci Leetcode
  • thisisit 1y ago
    Exactly my thoughts after listening to founders saying he crushes all the interviews.
  • Aurornis 1y 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.
    • kjkjadksj 1y ago
      You can proselytize all you want for thousands of years and you will never convert the whole world at once.
• jm20 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    How do you explain multiple places with in office work corroborating that he came into the office?
• jonathan-adly 1y 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.
• dazzeloid 1y 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)
  • robswc 1y 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.
    • dazzeloid 1y 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_cher 1y ago
    Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?
    • deepsun 1y 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 1y ago
      Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...
      • cududa 1y ago
• tuckerpo 1y 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 1y 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.
  • thomassmith65 1y 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-a 1y ago
      Then fire the CEOs, lawyers, investors, and top management with low character.
      • thomassmith65 1y ago
        I suppose, in that case, it's risky to employ people of lower character than the people managing them.
  • soneca 1y 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.
• suyash 1y ago
  It just shows how most startups don't have a good vetting system in place.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • ls-a 1y ago
    Leetcode interviews are a faang thing
• rincebrain 1y 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.
• Bjorkbat 1y 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.
  • occamsrazorwit 1y 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.
    • Aurornis 1y 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.
      • antonymoose 1y ago
        Years ago I was hired as an Engineering Manager at a small company, within about the first month on the job I had to have the awkward conversation about firing two of the employees on my team. See it turned out that the boss worked remote 4-1/2 days of the week, and the employees were in office. One would show up at 10, take 2 hour lunch around 11.30 and leave around 2.30. He did not work remote. This employee was as always behind on his work. Second wasn’t even a programmer. He just lied on his resume and got the job over beers and a handshake. He was a graphics designer, he played off a few WordPress template installs as his portfolio. To keep a story short, the owner spent months doing everything but firing the two employees, demanding I try to teach the designer some computer science and ignored the other scammer. He refused to believe he paid these men 6-figures for years on end. That I must be coming in here to lie and wreck his company, that I left my cushy high-frequency trading job to ruin his startup. When I asked the sole good engineer on the team what in the hell was going on at this company she simply told me “Oh, the old manager just did all the work for the other two guys since he was their buddy and hired them originally.”
• gargoyle9123 1y 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.
  • Aurornis 1y 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 1y ago
• baceituno 1y 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 1y ago
    How was it obvious?
• oh_no_not17532 1y ago
  [flagged]
• data_yum_yum 1y 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.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    The purpose of sharing his name was to warn other companies, not to discuss the story.
    • data_yum_yum 1y 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.
      • Aurornis 1y ago
        > 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.
• eviks 1y ago
  Because why would you expect startup hiring process to be good?
• ReD_CoDE 1y 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
• dalemhurley 1y 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.
• dalemhurley 1y ago
  This is insane, there is a Reddit, of course there is, of almost 500K people, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ 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 1y ago
    There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.
    • tuckerpo 1y 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.
      • Finnucane 1y ago
        This is why there’s a push to the four day workweek. People get just as much done, they just use their time more efficiently.
    • skeeter2020 1y ago
      but these people attend too many meetings; the OE ones miss everything.
    • rpcorb 1y ago
• the2ndfloorguy 1y ago
  https://thesohamparekh.com/ https://thesohamparekh.com/ /s
  • parekh-soham 1y ago
    [dead]
• kratos112233 1y ago
  [dead]
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• leovander 1y 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 1y 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 https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940441569276158190
  • Aurornis 1y 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 1y ago
      But they haven't checked his employment eligibility or he wouldn't have started his first week.
      • FireBeyond 1y ago
        Legally, you have three days to complete an I-9 after starting a new position. Given that there's no oversight of the verification process, that can slide, too.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Nextgrid 1y 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 1y ago
  People like him are going to accelerate the death of remote/hybrid roles
• mathverse 1y 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.
  • Nextgrid 1y ago
    Solution: lie and pretend you're in India and relocating to the US. /s
    • __turbobrew__ 1y 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 1y ago
  I can't even find one job. What's his secret?
  • Zealotux 1y 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/ https://leaderbiography.com/soham-parekh/
    • meander_water 1y 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 https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940287384131969067
  • nottorp 1y ago
    He was good at the office politics kabuki. Wore the right masks and all.
    • ayewo 1y 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.
      • nottorp 1y ago
        > Office politics comes after you land a job You think? I'm extending the term to actually getting a job in "traditional" organizations. You already have to optimize for keywords etc, don't you? It's not human interaction but a "process". > he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale. But they got an "AI" engineer didn't they? Or no one in management could define what an "AI" engineer is? Tbh I'd give the guy a high paying job, but in marketing.
• oh_fiddlesticks 1y 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?
  • mytailorisrich 1y 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 1y 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.
      • mytailorisrich 1y ago
        There are contractual terms, including things that are likely to be conflict of interests or impact performance. And depending on jurisdiction there are also laws on working hours: 48 hours max. per week on average in the UK and EU across all jobs (it is possible to opt out) and with minimum rest times. Because employers can be held liable, if they find out they won't let you. The comment I was replying to does not make sense.
      • closewith 1y ago
        However, if you are in the EU, then all your employers are jointly responsible for ensuring that your collective working hours don't breach the Working Time Directive, which means 48 hours as the maximum average working week, calculated over a 4-month period, across all employers (excluding certain statutory roles like seamen, law enforcement, and military).
• altairprime 1y 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 1y 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.
    • altairprime 1y ago
      Turns out I prefer some of my hobbies to benefit other people’s goals, which is often sated by employment.
      • isatty 1y ago
        Isn’t this just a cringey way to say you prefer your hobbies to make money.
        • altairprime 1y ago
          No? If I meant that, I would have said that. My current hobby that benefits others is reverse engineering something. I have no revenue plans or pathway for that effort, it’s been underway for five years, and it’s keeping my need to help occupied as I go through full-time school.
    • mock-possum 1y 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.
• nottorp 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• voidUpdate 1y 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...
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • cardanome 1y ago
    Could be a gambling addiction
    • baobabKoodaa 1y ago
      Maybe we don't need to take the word of a self-proclaimed fraudster at face value.
      • v5v3 1y ago
        Yes. People like that are adept at making you feel for them.
        • Tade0 1y ago
          He wasn't going for that, otherwise he would be more specific. This looks like some sort of money sink he's ashamed to admit having. Might be gambling, might be porn. Whatever it is, it's not something he'll garner any compassion for.
          • v5v3 1y ago
            He agreed to a YouTube interview with an established channel. As per his cold emails and interview patter, it is my opinion that he will have considered defence and mitigations arguments to present in the interview.
    • voidUpdate 1y 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 1y ago
  The moral of the story is that the current interviewing process is easy to cheat for people like him.
  • aleph_minus_one 1y 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 1y ago
  Reminded me of this guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589
  • twright 1y 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 1y 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.]
  • tkiolp4 1y 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 1y ago
      They did!
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • v5v3 1y ago
    >This guy should be absolutely ostracized. But it's funny. And people who make you laugh, even if naughty, get a pass.
  • account42 1y ago
    Except this is exactly the same thing that businesses constantly do to their employees and customers.
• tkiolp4 1y 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.
  • Lyngbakr 1y 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?
    • tkiolp4 1y 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 1y 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.
    • cardanome 1y 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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• Tade0 1y 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 1y 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.
  • ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
    people above and around you prefer if you stay within the range. over performing stresses other people out and causes conflict.
  • lazyeye 1y ago
    https://reddit.com/r/overemployed https://reddit.com/r/overemployed https://youtu.be/IWMngMm3_88 https://youtu.be/IWMngMm3_88
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • surajrmal 1y 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.
• dang 1y ago
  Related links that have been posted in other threads. Others? https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/who-is-soham-parekh-the-serial-moonlighter-silicon-valley-startups-cant-stop-hiring/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/who-is-soham-parekh-the-se... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/man-goes-viral-working-four-startups-time-rcna216890 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/man-goes-viral-working... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWMngMm3_88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWMngMm3_88
  • skeeter2020 1y 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.
• BergAndCo 1y ago
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• bmitc 1y 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 1y 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.
  • ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
    all the jobs are being outsourced is why
    • y-curious 1y ago
      I'm hoping that the section 174 fix from the latest tax bill will slow this down significantly
      • TimorousBestie 1y ago
        I’ll be surprised if it does. Software jobs are slumping for several reasons and the section 174 hack fixes one for a while but causes between one to four other problems depending on where you live.
        • johanyc 1y ago
          One to four other problems? what are they
  • nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
    Yeah, it's really something to read this.
  • firstplacelast 1y 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 1y ago
  TLDR: Tech has cargo-culted the interview process and people are gaming the system based on that interview process.
  • ls-a 1y ago
    TLDR: Low wages are backfiring
• deleted 1y ago
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• 5350-uiop-1130 1y 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 1y 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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• ungreased0675 1y 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 1y 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-cheney 1y 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.
• isatty 1y 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-a 1y ago
    I wish he was never caught. The companies deserved that
    • lexarflash8g 1y 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 ?
      • swores 1y ago
        > "Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?" You say that like you're unaware that huge numbers of people (I doubt anywhere near a majority, but significant numbers certainly) DO think that he is a hero who deserves to be pardoned. For a quick example, see https://x.com/search?q=Free%20luigi&src=typed_query https://x.com/search?q=Free%20luigi&src=typed_query
        • gfdujdufituj 1y ago
          I wouldn't call far-left terrorists "people".
          • Eisenstein 1y ago
            I'm sure you would be in good company with them, as you have also given up morality in order to dehumanize those to whom you are opposed.
      • ls-a 1y ago
• punkbit 1y 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 1y 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-a 1y ago
    Sounds like you're really bad at hiring. Paying low wages is backfiring at you
• lumost 1y ago
  Wouldn’t this be largely corrected by reference checks/letters in hiring? I’ve seen those becoming more frequent.
• tabs_or_spaces 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      Reference not responding is a red flag.
  • moomoo11 1y ago
    Yep. All these startups are probably shit.
• jaimebuelta 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  People underestimate how widespread this actually is.
• ralfcheung 1y 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."
• davidgerard 1y ago
  You must understand, these startup founders did extremely well on Raven's Progressive Matrices in grade school.
• codemystery 1y 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.
• Fatmaah 1y ago
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• bigfatkitten 1y ago
  The answer is that startups almost never do any meaningful personnel vetting. That’s why they also keep hiring North Koreans.
• marknoah 1y ago
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• marknoah 1y ago
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• stealthr 1y 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!!!
  • stealthr 1y ago
    did anyone see this? or was this censored?
• stealthr 1y 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!!!
• parekh-soham 1y ago
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• octo888 1y ago
  How has this been #1 Ask HN for about a week, falling to #2 just after a week?
• cgannett 1y ago
  Would suck to be an honest dude who happens to share the same name right now.
• northpoleescape 1y 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.
• marknoah 1y ago
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• marknoah 1y ago
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