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Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?

290 points jshchnz | 9 comments | 02 Jul 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom

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?

1. bibek_poudel ◴[02 Jul 25 21:24 UTC] No.44449018[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>44449180 #>>44458423 #
2. mathiaspoint ◴[02 Jul 25 21:45 UTC] No.44449180[source]▶
Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.
replies(2): >>44465129 #>>44478489 #
3. alpb ◴[03 Jul 25 19:32 UTC] No.44458423[source]▶
this email? https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745
replies(1): >>44464662 #
4. mpeg ◴[04 Jul 25 14:01 UTC] No.44464662[source]▶
That's a particularly terrible cold email, you can tell he didn't even bother applying some basic personalisation to it outside of [COMPANY_NAME]
replies(1): >>44465189 #
5. skeeter2020 ◴[04 Jul 25 14:59 UTC] No.44465129[source]▶
I suspect (and have seen some evidence) that the interviews he aced were algo-based. Doing well in these is very repeatable, with low additional effort. Behavioural are much harder to do at scale.
6. sreekanth850 ◴[04 Jul 25 15:05 UTC] No.44465189{3}[source]▶
Nutshell: Toxic founders who want developers to code 24X7 may hired him seeing this.
replies(1): >>44466786 #
7. anon_2222 ◴[04 Jul 25 18:24 UTC] No.44466786{4}[source]▶
ding ding ding. both soham + recruiter implied he basically just codes day and night. our founder (yc) was drooling! there's a very specific type of company + founder that falls for this stuff. no surprise he targeted ai startups.
replies(1): >>44469747 #
8. sreekanth850 ◴[05 Jul 25 02:43 UTC] No.44469747{5}[source]▶
Yes, this is probably what happened. Not like he was a super human engineer.
9. ninetyninenine ◴[06 Jul 25 07:05 UTC] No.44478489[source]▶
IQ tests are also distinct skills but IQ scores are the most quantifiable and studied numbers in all of psychology and correlate with all kinds of things like job performance.

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.