alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: 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?
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
Most US citizens applying for software engineering jobs can't even get a response to their resume, and then I read stories like this.
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.
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.
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.
for companies who hired him and let him go, you should be reviewing your interview system. it looks like we are going back to old argument "coders who are good at interviews (most likely leetcode), but terrible at delivering actual work."
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.
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.
He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing
Interviewing is a skill. I think that he got really good at it, both in tailor his CV as well as the process itself. It probably worked on the process and make adjustments. Based on the what I’ve read, it seems that he was interviewing all the time.
So, IMHO, he focused in the interview process over everything else, including understanding and exploiting the blind spots. He iterated and refined it, until, he became a master of it.
He really seemed to be not great at the work itself, though. He was being fired after a couple of days, which I don’t think is common. You really have to do it very badly to be fired so quick after being hired.
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.
US companies are afraid of litigations or European labour laws (irrelevant if you hire a contractor) but will not hesitate to hire questionable people from 3rd world countries for about the same pay like they would europeans.
That's bonkers.
I wonder if he's spending all the time optimizing for interviews & interviewing than actually working. I guess that's what you get if you make the interview process so terrible that only a full-time interviewer (as opposed to real employee) can pass it.
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?
> He estimated that he was bringing in $30,000 to $40,000 per month
Doesn't sound like "extremely dire financial circumstances" to me...
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.
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.
People underestimate how widespread this actually is.
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.
Do these teams know about version control? It’s quite simple to see who’s doing actual work and contributing…
Some claims he was brilliant, doing exactly what? Copying and pasting LLM output?
Did he participate in any hourly, daily technical conversations? Did he replied to others quick enough? Do these teams even know how to use slack, discord, etc? Are they having video meetings all the time and only person speaking like a podcast maybe?
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
I wonder... did any of those simultaneous jobs consider him a bad performer?
Did any of those simultaneous jobs even have someone who could evaluate their technical employees based on what they do and not signaling?
What I don't understand is why he updated his public profiles with all those simultaneous jobs..
What I find disturbing here is the number of people who are supporting him saying that he is a victim of the system.
Irrespective of his skills or how broken the system is, dishonesty can never be condoned.
Related links that have been posted in other threads. Others?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/who-is-soham-parekh-the-se...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/man-goes-viral-working...
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.
To anyone thinking this is the only hustle out there or this is uncommon, you've no idea what's really out there!
Wouldn’t this be largely corrected by reference checks/letters in hiring? I’ve seen those becoming more frequent.
People like him are going to accelerate the death of remote/hybrid roles
What is the difference between this and leadership being in the committees, boards and executive seats of multiple companies?
Why is it the social expectation that an IC must devote 100% of their time and energy to the operations of a single company, when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?
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.
The moral of the story is that the current interviewing process is easy to cheat for people like him.
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?
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.
This seems to highlight how broken the hiring process is at these companies. I guess this is what you get when you want to leet code your candidates.
Because why would you expect startup hiring process to be good?
This guy, and guys like him, are the reason why it's such a pain to do legit business in the modern world.
Try getting a code signing certificate, opening a bank account for a new business or listing an app on the App Store. You'll quickly see the effects of this kind of behavior.
This guy should be absolutely ostracized.
[Edit: not to mention the countless brilliant Indian software devs for whom he just directly put Silicon Valley out of reach.]
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.
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.