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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Someone can be a good developer and also be a scammer. I don't understand why you think this is hilarious or weird.
> 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.
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.
There is a high risk that the AI bubble will collapse.
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.
Possibly these are becoming more common because of /r/overemployed.
Most companies don't want you working another W-2 job, but realize they can't just ban all consulting.
/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing
I don't think anyone has the morals or trust anymore for the way we used to do corporate work.
If they're so talented, then they should probably work on their own thing.
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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.
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.
Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t, but keeping the myth going even if it comes with bad stories is valuable.
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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.
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.
https://youtu.be/IWMngMm3_88
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
What if you did engineering before and just moved to software engineering because that somehow pays more than the noble profession of engineering?
* "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.
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.
“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.
Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?
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?
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?
[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940441569276158190
worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job (we also let him go when we discovered the multiple jobs)
Think it says a lot about this industry if "really talented 'engineer'" means passing loads of gamified interviews and not delivering things on time.
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.
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.
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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.