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?
22 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?
/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing
worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job (we also let him go when we discovered the multiple jobs)
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.
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.
Cults are a subset of teams.
Typically employers pay you and cults don't.
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?
Perhaps, he is also genuinely good at cracking these interviews. No wonder, he's been through so many of them.
Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.
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.
So, super easy to scam all of them with the same skillset and mannerism.
(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.
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.
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.
... why? If the guy's doing well by all metrics and not leaking IP, literally, who cares?
So I think that finding about multiple employment is actually about realizing he was lying the whole time with the excuses.
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.
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.
/s
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.