317 points by jshchnz 12 days ago
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?
> The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.
I worked with an overemployed person (not Soham). It was exactly like this.
Started out great. They could do good work when they knew they were in focus. Then they started pushing deliverables out farther and farther until it was obvious they weren't trying. Meetings were always getting rescheduled with an array of excuses. Lots of sad stories about family members having tragedies over and over again.
It wears everyone down. Team mates figure it out first. Management loses patience.
Worst part is that one person exhausts the entire department's trust. Remote work gets scrutinized more. Remote employees are tracked more closely. It does a lot of damage to remote work.
> Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good.
I doubt it's a dev shop because the dev shops use rotating stand-ins to collect the paychecks, not the same identity at every job. This guy wanted paychecks sent directly to him.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
> He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.
Wild to be cutting work trial days in half to do other jobs. Although I think he was also testing companies to see who was lenient enough to let him get away with all of this.
> However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
What a silly waste of his time and reputation (in addition to other people's).
If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?
> If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?
Much much easier said than done.
99% of companies that want to hire employees won't hire a contractor/consultant instead for that job.
How do I know? 15 years experience, top candidate in many interviews, great salary / employment. Yet every time I've tried to get a consulting arrangement set up it's been extremely hard and ultimately unprofitable (i.e. pays significantly less than full-time job, on average).
> If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?
I've worked with several small contracting businesses, including some that came highly recommended.
They were all very inefficient relative to having someone in-house. They also came with the problem that institutional knowledge was non-existent because they had a rotating crew of people working for you.
Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge. The companies he applied for specifically did not want to contract the work out to a body shop.
Or work at Meta or Microsoft and make $600k-950k and become a sr production engineer or principal engineer quickly.
Being disloyal and breaking trust and reputation for temporary gain is crazy.
>Or work at Meta or Microsoft and make $600k-950k
Getting that kind of pay at Meta at least, is less skill and more politics. If he had the soft skills to get that job he would be probably doing that.
> 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.
It's hilarious because companies use such scammable ways to define who is "top 0.1%"
Also there's a ton amazing engs out there who want and need work but the companies all only want that one "perfect" guy (or gal), as if such a thing exists
> Being a good developer and being a scammer are completely uncorrelated variables.
One could expect good developers to be less inclined to fraud as they may not “need” it as much.
That also made me thing of Berkson’s paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
If these were really independent traits they would look negatively correlated as we talk about people who are good OR scammers.
There’s literally no evidence they did either of these things. I really hope these companies can explain their hiring process as it reflects badly on them that they keep calling him top 0.1% without any explanation of their process.
The had 100 candidates and hired him. Top 1% QED. (/s)
> 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.
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.
A disinterested Richard Feynman is a better physicist than a very interested highschooler. Skill and value extraction are not the same thing.
we interviewed him and passed. he was horrible. it blows my mind seeing these reports of him crushing interviews and being a great dev. the bar for programmers is woefully low. on second thought there's got to be more to this story because he came to us through a recruiter who talked him up big time. did he come to you through a recruiter too? if so then either the recruiter is in on it or he has an army of different recruiters getting him in front of yc people. also you say you worked with him in person but other reports say he was in india. something not adding up here. i can verify my story by giving you the Nth character of the quirky email address he uses. can you do the same?
I assume its because his resume showed hes worked at sexy startups recently (true or not)
Having worked at sexy-startup for 9 months recently with a good excuse why you left would get your resume to the top of the pile if it was read
Is it still common to ask leetcode questions during interview?
No explanation has been provided to show hes good at leetcode either.
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?
What type of interview you have, I presume non LeetCode style?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Do employment contracts in the US not normally have "sole focus" clauses? We have those in my location.
I think an copyright/IP assignment contract is standard in many or most U.S. software jobs, at least when working for a big enough company that they have a lawyer who handles the NDA/employment paperwork.
That pretty much automatically rules out over employment because you can’t separately promise two different companies that you’re assigning all software copyrights to them rather than you, it’s an incompatible contract (even if it’s limited to work hours - you’re pretending to both companies that you’re working 9-5 solely for them).
Fascinating. My locality is usually kinda lax but it's something that we have.
I would have thought that with the litigious culture in the US and non-competes etc... this would all be watertight. Seems kinda ridiculous that with a non-compete you can't work for a competitor once you've quit but you're free to do so while you still work for your employer, lol.
I think these might soon be called Soham clauses, to be a bit cheeky.
Employment contracts that are reduced to a single explicit written agreement are relatively rare in the US, most employment contracts are implied by conduct.
> Employment contracts in the US are rare.
Really? Does that mean what it say: you get a job and you do not get a written contract?
I don't think, in 38 years of working in 3 different countries, I've ever NOT had a written contract, even for temp or contractor roles. WTAF?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
You might not be aware, but hiring outside of the country causes a whole slew of other points of friction and complexity. It actually isn't "one very simple solution" in practice, which is why many startups don't do it.
I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard.
1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service
2. You can also not hire them, and use their services as independent contractors instead. I've never had an issue doing this with my finance teams, as long as the contractor submits a valid invoice they don't care who they are. Plus, it's good for cashflow (net 30 to net 90 is pretty standard) and the hire gets a nice tax save on their end.
I do understand that at large companies it can be tricky, but IMHO at startups there is little excuse. I suppose it all doesn't matter if you're playing with unlimited silicon valley VC money, I've only ever had to deal with european investors and they love a bit of smart frugality.
Oh so you’re not American but you’re explaining how obvious it is that American companies should hire outside of America
I agree if I had the UK talent pool domestically, European investors, a different health insurance regime, and existed in a different timezone, the calculus might be different.
Aside: how many people were at the company where you were paying recruiters $25k to find people?
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.
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.
For most of us, our J2 is chatting on Hacker News. These guys make it pay.
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.
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.
people above and around you prefer if you stay within the range. over performing stresses other people out and causes conflict.
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.
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.
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.
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!
And how much delay is caused by waiting for that developer to show up and get hired?
> 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
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.
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.
I honestly don't understand that, as well. I am a real engineer on paper and now do full-time software development. The funny thing is, "real" engineers mostly think that programming computers is like doing magic. Meanwhile, many software developers think that "real" engineers are somehow special..
> 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?
Much like many attorneys that instead choose the less noble profession of police officer. Yes, that does happen, but it’s not the scenario that most software people consider when arbitrarily choosing such lofty false titles. Most software people were never licensed electrical/mechanical/civil engineers.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
@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.
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 ?
> "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
If there were more like him, powerful people would be less unhinged.
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.
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?
On Twitter some of the founders discussed this. He would give references to people who answered the phone and then praised his work generically. One person said they thought it was strange that both of his reference checks seemed like really young guys, but it's the startup world so they overlooked it.
There was one Tweet from someone who said they did a reference check from someone who said he did good work when he was working, but he was working multiple jobs at the same time so he wasn't working much. Maybe he assumed his references wouldn't be checked often, and maybe he was right?
For my last job — the guy who was supposed to verify my permanent address called me and asked me to ask someone in my village to take a photo of the house with same day newspaper in the view and send it to him. I forwarded the request to my future employer asking whether it was the normal verification procedure :-)
Unicorns are easier to find than newspapers. If you threaten to shoot me unless I bring newspaper - I am not even sure where they sell them anymore in my city.
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.
But they haven't checked his employment eligibility or he wouldn't have started his first week.
Legally, you have three days to complete an I-9 after starting a new position.
Given that there's no oversight of the verification process, that can slide, too.
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)
> 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.
But the person you’re responding to said he did a solid job for almost a year.
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?
> worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job
The people assessing his talent are falling for the same delusion as the people conducting the interview.
If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.
Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?
When we had an OE person they could do good work if you gave them a lot of time, but getting them to communicate and be present with the team was hell. You had to always be tracking them down, getting them to respond, and working any meetings (which we had few of) into some narrow time slot where they were available.
It also drags everyone else down. The team figures out what's going on. They get tired of adjusting their communication around the one person who's always distracted and doing something else.
Basically, it turns into a lot of work for everyone else to get work out of the OE person. Like they can do good work, but they're going to make everyone else work hard to extract it from them because they're busy juggling multiple jobs.
All of the Soham stories I've read today have been the same: Good work when he was working, but he was caught because he wasn't working much.
Yes. He could do solid work when you narrowly define it but he probably sank the productivity and morale of people he was working with.
Individual performance doesn’t matter. Team performance does. All of this work to find 10x engineers is meaningless if they can’t raise the output of the team itself. People can make their teams better (sometimes with elite communication skills instead of technical), but we should be focusing more on building 10x teams, not trying to find unicorns.
Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...
People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.
It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.
I worked with a guy who wasn't even "over employed" but was working on some big side project at home.
He would blow off any meeting before noon. Just wouldn't show up.
His work was usually late and rushed/poor quality. Lots of corners cut. Oftentimes he didn't even get something right the first time because he didn't have the full context because he missed discussion that happened in the meetings he didn't show up to.
He was full of shit. Every day he was having some personal tragedy. Excuse after excuse.
He started trouble with teammates in a way I've just never seen before.
He was just all around a net negative even though he occasionally did decent work. Everyone was happy to see him go.
It seems to me a really talented engineer would deliver more than solid work, no?
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.
This is my experience for the past 10 years I've been working in the industry. As soon as someone finds out I am more capable at something than the rest of the colleagues on the team I get to do all the work in that area yet receive nothing in return. Every time I tried to bring something up as an example of doing something more my achievements were downplayed as part of the regular duties or my mistakes were put on the pedestal instead. There were also calls to do more, even though I already was doing more than the average programmer on the project. Nothing was ever enough.
In my current job I aimed to be painfully average at everything I do and so far I haven't seen any difference. I still get the same reviews I was getting all these years and the salary increases are still as mediocre as the ones I was getting when I was trying my best. My only fear is that this strategy might lead to complete stagnation. I am already bored out of my mind and I would switch jobs in a heartbeat, but I can't currently do that due to variety of reasons.
This is insane, there is a Reddit, of course there is, of almost 500K people, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ , who discuss all of the strategies to do this.
Just imagine being one of the people who legit joins a startup, is passionate, working long hours, earning your vest, to have your coworker pretending to be working.
The VPs, heads of, and C levels of most of the companies I have worked for were also pretending to be working. They knew the company wasn’t profitable, they gave a couple of advices here and there, and then left the company. Big pay checks. Now they are doing the same all over again in other companies.
Tired of considering this “normal” and nobody talking about it. But when one simple engineer does it, well, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, yada yada.
Every manager and employer should skim through that subreddit. When I stumbled onto it I felt like Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense, where the truth was revealed and every flashback moment suddenly made sense and lined up. Until then, things just felt “off” but it was hard to put a finger on what was actually going on.
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.
Yes. It's the same with wage theft.
Wage theft vastly outstrips other forms of theft[0] and it's considered a complete non priority by law enforcement, politicians, and the media.
These kinds of things just aren't a priority for one reason for another. Let's brainstorm some solutions to wage theft and overemployment.
I suggest a synergistic approach -- fix wage theft and it'll have a knock-on effective with things like overemployment or people pretending to work a single job.
What do you think?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft#/media/File:Wage_th...
How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.
but these people attend too many meetings; the OE ones miss everything.
> 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.
How many of those are bots? How many are teenagers? How many are playing pretend? 90% would be a conservative estimate.
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.
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.
>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?
On upwork you are competing with people from third world countries who can offer vastly lower prices.
Also the quality of the work is bottom of the barrel.
What you want to do is look for small to mid sized companies in your area and solve problems for them. You gonna build up your network and reputation.
There is a good reason many people don't go freelance, it is not for everyone. You need some really good social and business skills and it can be stressful. But the money is sure there.
I did two full-time jobs for a month as part of changing jobs fifteen years ago and it’s exceedingly intense but otherwise was fine; eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have. Employers don’t like this because that’s a lot of work they could have persuaded an employee to provide as unpaid overtime labor instead; much this outrage is simple jealousy. If you’re doing the job to the specifications requested at a sufficient level to remain employed, then they have no basis to cry outrage. Employment is just as monogamous as marriages are: sometimes, not always.
24-18 = 6 hours "non-working" time. Eating, washing and shitting is min 1 hour/day.So 5 hours of bed time with around 4.75 hrs of sleep at most, because we don't fall asleep right away.
The math doesn't work long term. It may be kept for 1-2 months even when a person is 21 yrs old, but I doubt it it can be sustained more than that.
It doesn’t necessarily take 18 hours a day to do two full-time jobs for a full workday. Certainly I’ve never spent longer than three weeks doing 16h/day! I don’t advise it.
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.
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?
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.
Turns out I prefer some of my hobbies to benefit other people’s goals, which is often sated by employment.
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.
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.
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.
Odds are this is a dev shop with more than one person doing at least some things. It would explain how “he” was able to get so many jobs and maintain appearances. And a lot of startups don’t have the best screening processes to begin with (have a beer with a founder, check out their source code, you’re hired!). This is exactly the place where the structure and processes of larger companies can be a benefit. And even then, people work multiple jobs and get away with it. It’s become popular post COVID.
Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.
Think so too. Also because different companies have different "reviews" of his work. Some saying he was only good at interviews, others saying the quality of work was good. Must have been diffferent people working.
How do you explain multiple places with in office work corroborating that he came into the office?
I 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.
Nutshell: Toxic founders who want developers to code 24X7 may hired him seeing this.
Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.
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.
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.
A handful of comments already alluded to it, but maybe YC startups aren’t as smart as they think they are when they are looking for their founding engineers. Especially when it’s just the two founders looking for find their early engineers and the one holding the mba is the one leading/hiring. East to dupe these folks early on?
Honestly, it’s the way I’m planning to go. Not 4 simultaneous full time jobs, but 2 (or one fulltime job and 2 contractor part time jobs). Reason: it’s easier to pass the interview for less demanding jobs (not faang, not second level faang), they are less demanding in the day to day (no “exceeds expectations”, “meets expectations”, “under expectations”, just simply “good job Joe!” and “shit happens Joe”), they are usually less structured (no silly ex-faang engineers/managers playing god). They usually pay less, ofc, hence the need to have a couple of jobs.
At least in western europe, it’s very hard to land a 130K job, but two 65K jobs? Rather fine.
I wonder how two full time contracts could even work out in Europe. Surely they both can't pay the social security contributions, pension etc?
Also don't most work contracts expressly prohibit taking a second job, with the reasoning that the company expects employees to rest so they stay productive in the main job?
It's hard to get a 130K job in EU but it's easy to reach and exceed that as an independent contractor, so that's an avenue you could try out.
Here in Germany you are currently only allowed to work 48hours per week. Also there are strict laws for companies to actually track work time.
So it is absolutely impossible for someone here to have two full time jobs without committing working time fraud.
But even if you could, it would make literally no sense two have jobs as you earn vastly more with freelancing anyway. You would scam yourself.
The most optimal move is to have one regular job so you get health care and social security and do freelancing on the side. If you work contract allows that, of course.
Really? Like, in Germany it's illegal for someone to have a full-time job doing software and then a side business making soap and selling it at a farmer's market on the weekend?
That's... peculiar.
>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
>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.
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.
Could you give me an example of these non demanding jobs? Just so I get sense of the type of company you mean.
He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing
Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.
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.
Be competent and able to prove it. Work with in-demand tools - for me that's .NET, React, Azure, SQL dbs etc. For others it may be go, python, java, AWS, GCP whatever is in demand near you. Probably not Rust, C or C++ etc - I'm sure there's demand for that too but at least near me they're a lot rarer.
Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.
Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.
If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.
Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.
He perfected the hiring game, probably automated fake activity on his GitHub, lied on his resume, among other things: https://leaderbiography.com/soham-parekh/
There are a few comments from the companies that hired him in the og twitter thread [0]. Sounds like he was actually really good at interviews. Kinda shows how broken the hiring system is if you can smash an interview but fail catastrophically at the job.
GP is asking how is he able to land multiple jobs in the first place when they can’t even land one.
Office politics comes after you land a job so it doesn’t explain why he was so successful at getting multiple offers.
I’ve seen claims on Twitter that he used multiple tactics:
1. Good ol’ cold emails;
2.Using a recruiter for warm intros
3. Applying like everyone else but with a resume that is full of fabrications.
A common thread in many of his victim companies: he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
> Office politics comes after you land a job
You think? I'm extending the term to actually getting a job in "traditional" organizations. You already have to optimize for keywords etc, don't you? It's not human interaction but a "process".
> he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
But they got an "AI" engineer didn't they? Or no one in management could define what an "AI" engineer is?
Tbh I'd give the guy a high paying job, but in marketing.
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.
Reminded me of this guy.
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.
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.