Serious question: why aren't so many startups hiring processes filtering out a candidate who is scamming/working multiple jobs?
Serious question: why aren't so many startups hiring processes filtering out a candidate who is scamming/working multiple jobs?
72 comments
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?
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).
I work as a contractors with all my clients (who know of each others) and they all pay significantly more per hour compared to an employee. As an employee I could expect to make 1/4 of what I actually make.
The only exception in this arrangement was when I worked with an US company, they wanted to hire me as an employee and paid 1k per month to some company in my country just to hire me. An insane waste of money, not to mention taxes on my side.
Sounds like a legit negotiation strategy:
- You prefer a consulting arrangement over being hired.
- The company prefers to pay less for the job.
So both involved sides get a part of the pie that is negotiated about, and has to compromise on another aspect.
The take home pay after carrying more expenses probably makes it worse.
Uber sells demand for transport. They don't own the transport and the burden of owning, and maintaining the transport is pushed on to freelancers, who have less certainty of income than they would as employees might.
Theres been lots written about the insecurity to employment that is created by more things offering gig jobs on one hand but not always ending up also offering part time or full time positions.
From the customers side, apps like Uber provide a sense of certainty (visual map) that existing industries haven't been willing to invest the same kind of capital into and those apps as a result are not comparable or inviting.
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.
If you keep your standards high when hiring contractors you'll get the same level of quality you have with employees. Contractor agencies are also pretty happy to have long lasting clients (I have been with my current clients respectively for: 4 years, 3 years, 1 years and 1 month).
Then make it part of the contracting deal that the contractors have to give the in-house people sufficient training about the code/project that they worked on.
Being disloyal and breaking trust and reputation for temporary gain is crazy.
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.
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.
Lots of devs don't have personal projects. I love programming but after spending the whole day programming I don't particularly want to go home and continue programming.
With agentic coding on the rise, it's easier to make a side project after a year of nights and weekends.
Nobody wants to go home and make a project that proves to future employers you can do the job, everybody wants to get paid though.
You might find on the opposite end of the spectrum that someone with a perfectly equal skillset is laughing at the idea of taking on personal projects when he can just optimize for getting hired somewhere where they prioritize paying you to learn on the job.
Someone can be a good developer and also be a scammer. I don't understand why you think this is hilarious or weird.
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
This is in Norway, maybe it's different elsewhere.
The other hand, the bad developers (impostors) who easily found jobs were typically sycophants. On the other hand, many highly skilled developers were rather more stubborn (they can't stand bullshit), very honest, and not "corporate politicians".
There’s an element of chance, and stuff like leetcode is just a veneer of science over a vibe based process, which conveniently scopes out management culpability. Personally, I think it’s hilarious that Silicon Valley types have essentially enshrined civil service exams for hiring.
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.
> 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.
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
Leetcode provides an extremely lazy and cheap way of “solving” the problem of assessing an applicant’s skills.
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.
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).
There are some nuances and I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of it is that three ways to trigger the IP to attach to your employer:
1. You do it on-prem or during work hours (but work hours are flexible for salaried employees)
2. You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)
3. It's reasonably related to what you or other people do at your day job
If none of those apply, then you own it. That's relevant to the discussion at hand because, at least in California, you could work from home for two companies with unrelated businesses and not break any rules.
Familiar to fans of HBO's _Silicon Valley_!
All successful big tech businesses - all of them - got that way by openly breaking laws. They don't trigger automatically, but upon a manual review, triggered by someone with at least a couple grand to spend on the endeavour. A lot flies under the radar in practice.
/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing
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.
While US employment is usually at will without a defined contract term, there are mutually enforceable obligations, including some definition of what the employee is obligated to do for the employer and that the employer is obligated to pay the employee at some specified rate assuming the employee's obligations are met. That's a contract. Exactly what the detailed terms are may be difficult to prove absent a single comprehensive written document, but it is a contract.
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?
Many companies that don’t use formal contracts instead put all the information that is common to all employees into an employee handbook, and the details that are unique to a specific employee into the offer letter. The offer letter given to a new hire has details such as their starting salary and start date, and once they arrive they are given a copy of the handbook and often time to read it and discuss it with a manager. The handbook will explain in detail how promotions happen, the work expected from for various job titles, any rules the employees are expected to follow, etc, etc. Together these form the common understanding that underlies the contract, even if there is never a formal contract signed by both the employer and the employee.
Contractors, on the other hand, always have a formal contract. Often a contractor spends a significant amount of their time negotiating these contracts, especially the scope of work. I should know, I worked as a contractor for many years.
Executives can be an exception.
Exceptional circumstances are an exception.
Increasingly less common union jobs are an exception.
But ‘at will’ is far more common in the US.
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.
Do you really think several busy startups are going to band up and sue a person (esp in California)?
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.
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.
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?
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
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 ?
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
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?
Irrational and nostalgic.
[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940441569276158190
Given that there's no oversight of the verification process, that can slide, too.
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.
In my opinion and experience, being a competent developer and being a good interviewer are even less related than being a competent developer and being a good interviewee (and the latter are already very unrelated).
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.
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.
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.
It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.
I had the same experience as you with an "overemployed" person: Working with them is really bad for everyone else. They lie, play extreme politics, throw teammates under the bus, make you work harder for everything, and they don't care if it causes you harm because you're just a temporary coworker at one of their "Js"
There's nothing to celebrate about these people. They screw over their teammates far more than the company they work for.
What blows my mind is people think overemployment of an engineer is bad, but it is more than acceptable for CEO to held top positions in different companies.
The difference is in most cases the CEO owns the business or a good chunk of it so they’re actually capital owners and employees in name only. If you own the business you make the rules.
To the extent.
I own my skills and I make the rules. To the extent.
What about people that put full effort and then some into jobs with long hours and loads of stress just to get hit with a PIP or get caught in the latest round of layoffs?
If that's how companies treat people, what's so wrong with 'overemployed' people having a fallback, especially in today's market?
So you could fight us, but plenty just join us in playing games, lowering expectations, and collecting their check and going home. We are awful colleagues if you have ambition, but if you do not, we get along fine with people.
Cults are a subset of teams.
Typically employers pay you and cults don't.
Both have implicit contracts, and a contract requires consideration on both sides. The parties define the value of the consideration, so you can have a junior cult member who feels they are getting good value for what they pay, or a SW dev at an insurance company who feels they don't. I also don't see much difference in your ability to affect your situation if you are unhappy with the current state.
Its like saying why cant there be good shark attacks on surfers.
Defining traits of cults are that they try to brainwash you, destroy your identity and replace it with one the cult approves of.
This can happen to various degrees of severity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I don't think this is uncommon.
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?
Also, most of my contracts have come through referral. It's absolutely possible to survive freelancing as a software engineer.
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.
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.
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.
Lol - you don't have enough hobbies.
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.
The real question is why did so many YC founder fell for his tricks? He is not even the US and he claimed he is coming over to so many companies?
All these people saying we hired him and he was good. No, he wasn't.
If he could scam about location and lie about so many thing, what makes you think he did not cheat during interviews?
He likely used cluely or some shit software like that to cheat.
A scam through and through.
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.
Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.
That's bonkers.
Perhaps, he is also genuinely good at cracking these interviews. No wonder, he's been through so many of them.
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.
At least in western europe, it’s very hard to land a 130K job, but two 65K jobs? Rather fine.
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.
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.
That's... peculiar.
What is an issue is working employed for two jobs and going over the 48 hour limits.
Working that much is very unhealthy so the state needs to protect people from being exploited. People should be able to live from working full time. Having to work multiple jobs and to destroy your own health is morally abhorrent.
Under German law being employed by a company and being self-employed are legally very distinct things. If you are employed you get protection from being fired, you have to have health care, pay into the retirement fond and so on.
If you are self-employed you are on your own. You can decide if you use public or private health care, you need to figure out how to save up for retirement yourself and so own. You get more freedom but less protection. That is because the law realizes that working people need protection from exploitation but also wants to give freedom to those that want to try their own business.
I get that the state needs to protect people from being exploited but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about it.
It seems to me that it would be better if the state had policies in place to ensure that one full-time job (or less even) provided sufficient income to enable a person to live self-sufficiently and raise a family.
Working a full-time job and raising a family is often a more stressful thing than a single person working a job that requires over-time. I don't see why the state should regulate how someone without kids spends their free time if that person wants to work.
Some people are just naturally inclined to be active, whether it's some combination of work, family, volunteering, and sports activities while others are not. I have a friend who is constantly working and constantly going to concerts and playing on several sports teams. His life seems stressful to me and far beyond how I want to spend my life but he enjoys it.
The state shouldn't restrict people from choosing how to spend their time, but instead should strive to create a society where people aren't forced to spend too much of their time working to meet their basic needs, with the ultimate goal of gradually reducing the time needed to do so over time.
So single people that can work 60 hours a day would get all the careers options while the person raising children is left in the dust? Does not sound fair.
> Some people are just naturally inclined to be active, whether it's some combination of work, family, volunteering, and sports activities while others are not.
That sounds like a healthy mix of activities. On the other hand working 60 hours a week is not.
> The state shouldn't restrict people from choosing how to spend their time,
It does not. You can create your own business and work yourself to death if you wish to. Again, the protection is for those that are employed by others.
Or in other words: You are allowed to hurt your own health as an entrepreneur but you are not allowed to employ people in such a way that it excessively hurts their health, even if they "consent" to it. Thing is, they can't consent because there is a power imbalance. Even if you make laws that people working less hours should not be discriminated, you can't really stop it.
Not to mention someone who is a workaholic needs psychological help not the "freedom" to work more.
> but instead should strive to create a society where people aren't forced to spend too much of their time working to meet their basic needs, with the ultimate goal of gradually reducing the time needed to do so over time.
We already could already be working significantly less. I always like to link https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
That is just not how capitalism works. Yes, you can fight for wage increases. You can fight for limits of working hours. But those gains will have to be paid in blood.
You idea would only work under socialism which had the Subbotnik which was volunteer unpaid labor on the weekends for the betterment of society.
Raising kids is but one kind of life stressor and it's not the state’s job to "equalize" life paths by punishing those who don’t have children or want to pursue different goals. Instead, the state should ensure a strong safety net so people are free to find their own balance.
Some pursuits genuinely take a monk-like dedication to see breakthroughs and we shouldn't hobble ambitious people who want to undertake them in the interest of fairness. You're describing a world where someone can't become a viruouso cellist, pioneer a life saving neurosurgery technique or revolutionize computer architecture because someone else decides to have kids. That doesn't sit right with me -- it's a little too Harrison Bergeron.
People might want to throw themselves into intense work for a decade before changing direction and focusing on raising a family or giving back to their community. Or maybe they want to do that the other way, start a family first and then once their kids are adults they want to pursue dreams that they spent decades dreaming of. Flexibility and dynamism in life roles is part of a healthy society.
The role of the state should be to ensure that no one has to 60 hours a week to survive and to ensure that everyone has real opportunities to live their best life that they choose -- not to make that choice for them.
No one is forbidden to work more. You seem to miss that those laws apply to wage labor. You keep bringing up all kinds of work that have nothing to do with this.
> You're describing a world
I am describing the status quo in Germany and many other developed countries. The US are the outlier.
> someone can't become a viruouso cellist
No one is telling you how much or little you are allowed to practice an instrument. You can practice 24/7 in as far as the German state is allowed. Not to mention musicians that are self-employed anyway.
Same with the other points. You can dedicate all you waking time into practicing to solve leet code questions. You can focus everything on your research.
You can work on any hobby you have as much as little as you want. You do do as much research as you want. You can work on your own business as much as you want.
The ONLY, the ONLY thing you can't do is employ someone to work more than 48 hours per week. And reverse be employed on a job that requires you to work for more than 48 hours.
I think that is pretty reasonable.
> it's not the state’s job to "equalize" life paths by punishing those who don’t have children or want to pursue different goals.
Children used to have the freedom to work themselves to early death in mines and factories. It got so bad that it threatened the very foundation of society. So after that yeah people figured the state absolutely should protect children and families.
And again, this has nothing to do with wanting to equalize everyone. There are many areas where exceptional people can go.
I think that you're missing the broader point that I'm trying to make here which is this: Why should the state mandate a cap on voluntary employment, rather than focus on ensuring that no one needs to work that much to survive? A system that protects workers from coercion is great. But a system that also prohibits voluntary overcommitment, even when it's for personal growth, artistic mastery, or short-term goals, feels overly paternalistic and your example regarding child labour laws exemplifies that paternalism.
I feel like you're defending the system in Germany not because it's a better system as measured by some objective criteria but because it's the system that you identify with. Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion that a system where people are not allowed to pay other people for more than 48 hours of their time in a week a better system that leads to better outcomes than one where people are free to exchange their time in exchange for a wage with mandatory overtime?
This thread started by parent telling you how it is in Germany. Meanwhile, you have provided zero data or objective criteria yourself...
Again, overtime is perfectly legal, we were just talking about the average working time per week.
> Why should the state mandate a cap on voluntary employment, rather than focus on ensuring that no one needs to work that much to survive?
Because the first one is the easiest way to ensure the later one. You are missing the power dynamic between employer and employee. That is they main point. It is just not possible for the extra work to be truly voluntarily.
It is the same principle why a boss having sex with their assistant is deeply unethical. Because the power dynamic. Even if we assistant is attracted to them. They know refusing could have consequences for their career.
Plus, that unicorn worker that wants to work more than 48 hours to make someone else rich and is otherwise a healthy, non workaholic individual, does not even exist. If someone is that driven they can just go freelancing and earn even more money.
You idea is solid in a vacuum but just doesn't work with the real power dynamics under capitalism.
> Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion that a system where people are not allowed to pay other people for more than 48 hours of their time in a week a better system that leads to better outcomes than one where people are free to exchange their time in exchange for a wage with mandatory overtime?
I mean the US has one of the worst work-life balances of any developed country, so yeah. Meanwhile Germany is pretty good in that regard. Again, most developed countries limit work time somehow.
Also you don't really need to track your hours when freelancing other than maybe for billing purposes so you really don't need to worry about hours anyway. Generally you are considered part-time self-employed when doing less than 18 hours per week.
Earning a bit on the side is really not an issue in Germany. In fact the combination of having a part time employed job and then doing freelancing is very popular.
What doesn't work is being full time employed at two companies but that would make no sense even if you could as you would earn much less and pay insane taxes.
Having the right and your employer agreeing to it isn't the same. Do you want people to go to the court if the employer denies it with the risk of losing the 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
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940287384131969067
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.
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.
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
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.
(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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589
Doesn't sound like "extremely dire financial circumstances" to me...
This looks like some sort of money sink he's ashamed to admit having. Might be gambling, might be porn. Whatever it is, it's not something he'll garner any compassion for.
As per his cold emails and interview patter, it is my opinion that he will have considered defence and mitigations arguments to present in the interview.
Many people don't understand how serious gambling addictions is. It destroys families. I can be as bad as any drug related addiction if not worse.
Though that was just one guess. There are many money sinks. Porn, gacha games and so on.
He withdrew $1,000 from the ATM from his home back in Asia. Was duly given the cash. He noticed though, that looking at online banking, his balance hadn't changed. Odd, but maybe it was a vagary of international transactions (and again, 20+ years ago).
Nope. So he took out another $1,000. And another. Every time, got the money, no transaction posted.
Not just one ATM, any.
Over the course of 2 years when it all came out, he had gotten $2M+ from this.
Know how he got caught? He took some of that money gambling. And sat at a table all night, constantly replenishing his stash. That tipped off the casino that something was odd, because they had loaded the ATM with $250K, which usually lasted ~48h, but he emptied out in a few. "Didn't we fill this this afternoon?".
Once they got the financial institutions it was also fairly quickly revealed.
And in court, the local banks admitted that there had been nothing flagged in their system, and presumably it would have kept working until (at least) his card expired.
There you have a literal money printing machine, and "No, let's see what I can win gambling". I suppose here's other factors like "Maybe it's easier to launder a big winning" but nonetheless, it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling.
Presumably he expected the jig to go up eventually and be asked to return the money; if his gambling was successful he could've returned the money and avoid any trouble, essentially having made his winnings on credit.
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?
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.
See it turned out that the boss worked remote 4-1/2 days of the week, and the employees were in office.
One would show up at 10, take 2 hour lunch around 11.30 and leave around 2.30. He did not work remote. This employee was as always behind on his work.
Second wasn’t even a programmer. He just lied on his resume and got the job over beers and a handshake. He was a graphics designer, he played off a few WordPress template installs as his portfolio.
To keep a story short, the owner spent months doing everything but firing the two employees, demanding I try to teach the designer some computer science and ignored the other scammer. He refused to believe he paid these men 6-figures for years on end. That I must be coming in here to lie and wreck his company, that I left my cushy high-frequency trading job to ruin his startup.
When I asked the sole good engineer on the team what in the hell was going on at this company she simply told me “Oh, the old manager just did all the work for the other two guys since he was their buddy and hired them originally.”
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..
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/who-is-soham-parekh-the-se...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/man-goes-viral-working...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWMngMm3_88
In a way the leftist tech scene has adopted eastern mysticism and shows how far california has moved from westernism. Hindu and Buddhism are religions that worship living humans and believe in divine incarnation. A young person might be a llama in hinduism or a tulku in buddhism. It's not to say that these tech startups are worshiping their newly discovered india programmer, but it is the culture that does not fall far from the tree.
Hint, start a company that does this and become the next unicorn overnight and help companies verify these right before offer stage. Good luck!!!
That’s why they also keep hiring North Koreans.
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?
The second part of this is disclosure, which was not done in this case.
We can debate if the executive timeline is too short and that's what destroys companies, but I don't see how this is the same as an over-employed engineer who's spread too thin.
Probably because said leadership would then be unable to keep their employees in meetings since they're supposed to do some actual work once in a while.
It is obviously easier to manage a small group of people who work full-time than a larger group of people who work part-time. So, if there does not exist a strong wish for part-time positions from the employees, few will be created.
Also, a lot of employees are there "for the money". So getting paid much worse for a part-time position is considered to be the worse deal by many employees.
Of course, that only goes for IT if done remotely.
That's no reason to throw seasonal warehouse jobs at me as a counterexample.
That this involved lying to your employers. There is no social expectation that you only work one job, plenty of people work multiple jobs, but there is a social expectation that you do what you said you'd do, and it turns out you have a bit of a mathematical problem if you try to work 4 eight hour jobs in a 24 hour day.
Which is, as per the article, how he was caught. Turns out if you call in sick at one place and then push code to github for your other jobs most employers aren't paying you for that.
It’s silly and servant-like to think you are in an equal-to-equal position when dealing with a company and that you cannot dedicate your time to other endeavors just because they wrote that in a paper. If it turns out that they don’t like how you perform while doing multiple jobs, they will fire you, just like they will fire you even if you work just for them.
If one of the parties is in breach of that contract it's normal it to be dissolved. If you don't want to work, you don't need to sign that contract.
The really moral part of free market economy is that both parties are voluntary entering a contract. You as a person sell your skilled time, the company buys your skilled time. If you have super unique skills, like Andrej Karpathy you sell something on the market that is very valuable and you have the upper hand. If you know "Microsoft Excel" I'd bet there are many people (or AI agents) that will do the same and what you're selling can be bought in many places (and time zones).
Basic microeconomics... In a free market you need to do something for the others to have something for you. And if it's not useful, they won't pay you for that.
The ones you describe where there is a contract for output, usually with external contractors not full-time employees.
And you indeed have agency, especially if you provide something hard to find or you're the sole provider for this company of that service and the switching cost is high. Basic microeconomics...
Just because the employer pays me and I signed a contract doesn’t mean I can’t complain or push back. Do you think I should also dance like a Walmart employee in the morning if my employer tells me to? The contract I signed says yes but in reality it doesn’t matter
The comment I was replying to does not make sense.
This is extremely rare; generally a CxO is a full-time job. Elon Musk is a notable exception, and, ah, it doesn't seem to be going _great_. Being a _board_ member isn't usually a significant time commitment.
It is kind of tiring for me to read people equating "Elon Musk" with "all those rich guys being CEOs".
When you really are a business owner OFTEN you have to devote 120% of your time and energy for running the company and single one.
People you see on TV flying private jets to expensive holiday destinations are not your average business owners. Elon and the likes are the exception not the norm.
He is the kind of person that companies actually want. (Otherwise these companies would have set up a different interviewing process (i.e. different incentives)).
:-)
instead of all the women chasing the same guy
its all the companies chasing the same dev
soham is a chad
has hiring turned into tinder?
Irrespective of his skills or how broken the system is, dishonesty can never be condoned.
... why? If the guy's doing well by all metrics and not leaking IP, literally, who cares?
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.
So I think that finding about multiple employment is actually about realizing he was lying the whole time with the excuses.
You need some degree of trust in your employees (you cannot "verify" all the time), and you cannot trust some guy you KNOW is cheating on you.
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.
So, super easy to scam all of them with the same skillset and mannerism.
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.]
But it's funny. And people who make you laugh, even if naughty, get a pass.
Why didn't he get the option to remain an anonymous scandal?
We don't need to know his name to discuss his actions.
Relevant people can share it privately and put out a public warning about obviously noticeable behavioral patterns.
Couple issues here:
1) Sharing it wide open on the Web for the whole world to see and everyone to poke fun of is a massive intrusion.
2) It's also a gateway to bunch of nonsense and false information all over the Internet. Half the stuff I see about this person under allegations, I just don't trust. Not to mention all of a sudden there are tens of impersonators.
3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
All this is happening too close to people openly talking about what AI researchers are being traded on every social media platform. Idk if any of these people ever wanted to be so famous.
If this person had done a single violation I'd agree. He's a serial manipulator, though, and he's been scamming people throughout the startup community. Once your behavior starts becoming a problem for a community, you shouldn't expect that community to also protect your identity.
The person was targeting a startup community (YC) and had learned how to game their system. The person posting the info didn't even post it immediately. They posted it a year later after hearing multiple stories of the person continuing to do it.
> 3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
There's a photo of him right in the thread specifically so people can determine if they're talking about the same person. He was also highlighted on a Meta open source developer blog a few years ago.
We all know people can have similar names.
I’m not even sure if this guy is real or a made up story to poke fun at YC community.
Either way, I’m not losing sleep over it.
Just letting all of you know that someone’s always watching
/s