Comment by gargoyle9123

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

> 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.

> Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates

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

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

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.

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.

Source: anonymous account created one day ago.

k

did you notice any hints of him cheating on the interview with LLMs? If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people

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.

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

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I don't doubt he's in the 1% or 0.1% of candidates you're interviewing, but there is one very simple solution startups could apply to make it easier to find top talent -> remove "US ONLY" from their job listings.