How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?
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?
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.
> 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?
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
Do employment contracts in the US not normally have "sole focus" clauses? We have those in my location.
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)
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...
It’s called team building. You can believe in it or not. You can join a company that values that, or not.
Where is the line between team and cult?
Cults are a subset of teams.
> Where is the line between team and cult?
Typically employers pay you and cults don't.
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.
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?
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.
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 :-)
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.
age
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.
Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.
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?
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.
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.
He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing
Exactly my thoughts after listening to founders saying he crushes all the interviews.
Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.
The Wolf of YC Street.
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.
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.
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.
There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.
It just shows how most startups don't have a good vetting system in place.
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.
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.
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
Because why would you expect startup hiring process to be good?
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.
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.
The purpose of sharing his name was to warn other companies, not to discuss the story.
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.
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?
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.
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.
None of the anecdotes I saw say that.
All of them say he did good work when he was working, but it was obvious that he was trying to do it as a part-time job.
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.
Racial bias in hiring
https://thesohamparekh.com/
/s