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

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)

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?

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.

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.

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.

> Where is the line between team and cult?

Typically employers pay you and cults don't.

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?

People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.

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.

All I hear is "really good at interviewing."

> People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.

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.

The people assessing his talent are falling for the same delusion as the people conducting the interview.

Perhaps he's talented at interviewing? Turns out this is the only skill you really need...

If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.

Most people are not putting full effort into their jobs, which is why we are considered heros.

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.

> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs

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.

I think you just described most of the C level executives in the tech industry. They leave companies behind destroyed, with a big pay check. But it’s unethical if simple engineers do it. Sure.

Cults can provide food, housing, and pay.(scientology employs alot of its members)

CEOs get fired too when a board with sufficient power doesn’t feel like they are performing.

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.

in fairness to some interview processes there are ways you could legit pass a valid interview and then short change the job. We do a problem scenario / proposed solution that's shared a few days in advance. Good candidates (and good frauds) can ace this with strong technical skills, relevant experience and maybe an hour or so of prep time. We'd take this as strong signal, because (and I'd hope more companies do this) we're optimizing for talented candidates, not minimizing people who are going to work multiple concurrent jobs.

This is a really good perspective, and I've seen a similar impact from "under employed" members of my teams. We have group-level product managers who have several scrum team-level PMs under them. The idea is they keep broader alignment and bigger-picture consistency, but when they don't spend time with each of the scrum teams, or miss planning meetings and important discussions the teams pay the price from lack of communication, coordination and a shared understanding.

Not sure what your direct experience is, but the difference I've experienced first hand is that C-suite are INTENSELY focused on the single company but only for a relatively short period of time. They're not spread too thin; they're motivated solely by short-term incentives. An OE engineer is both, and we can agree they all suck for people who want to do meaningful work and build an awesome team - but they seem very different to me.

Why do you need to draw a line? Can there be good cults and bad teams?

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.

It’s not acceptable

> but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing.

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).

I mean, most of my experience with large companies is that things are usually better for my team when the executive team is leaving us alone. A note here and there is nice; but any more focus and it's not great... better for everyone if they're busy doing something else. :P

How often do people put full effort into even one job? I do enough to move my career forward and to keep myself employed. Everything else is just working for free.

> he's a really talented engineer, crushed our interviews.

Think it says a lot about this industry if "really talented 'engineer'" means passing loads of gamified interviews and not delivering things on time.

> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.

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?

But the person you’re responding to said he did a solid job for almost a year.

> worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job

Simple: Two wrongs don't make a right.

I worked with a guy who wasn't even "over employed" but was working on some big side project at home.

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.

It seems to me a really talented engineer would deliver more than solid work, no?

That’s pretty faint praise.

He was a solid middle of the pack contributor on net, but it was clear he was way stronger than his net output just from interactions with him (he had great products ideas, clear technical understanding of many areas, etc).

funny thing was he had other places on his linkedin under "active employment" but we never really dug into it (until we learned he was full-time there) because he just seemed like the kind of person who wouldn't keep his LinkedIn up to date.

trust. he was not forthcoming when confronted with the "this other company says you are full-time and just went to their offsite - is that true?"

mid-level output, clearly had more capability than his output suggested from his ideas and some particularly strong contributions

Yes. He could do solid work when you narrowly define it but he probably sank the productivity and morale of people he was working with.

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.

> If you own the business you make the rules.

To the extent.

I own my skills and I make the rules. To the extent.

Why bother, when you get the paid the same regardless?

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.

This is my experience for the past 10 years I've been working in the industry. As soon as someone finds out I am more capable at something than the rest of the colleagues on the team I get to do all the work in that area yet receive nothing in return. Every time I tried to bring something up as an example of doing something more my achievements were downplayed as part of the regular duties or my mistakes were put on the pedestal instead. There were also calls to do more, even though I already was doing more than the average programmer on the project. Nothing was ever enough.

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.

The whole idea of a cult is negative.

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.