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

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.

> 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.

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.

Do employment contracts in the US not normally have "sole focus" clauses? We have those in my location.

> 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.

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?

did you notice any hints of him cheating on the interview with LLMs? If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people

I don’t think so. Or at most it talks about “reasonable effort” or something vague like that.

/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing

we interviewed him and passed. he was horrible. it blows my mind seeing these reports of him crushing interviews and being a great dev. the bar for programmers is woefully low. on second thought there's got to be more to this story because he came to us through a recruiter who talked him up big time. did he come to you through a recruiter too? if so then either the recruiter is in on it or he has an army of different recruiters getting him in front of yc people. also you say you worked with him in person but other reports say he was in india. something not adding up here. i can verify my story by giving you the Nth character of the quirky email address he uses. can you do the same?

> 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.

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.

Employment contracts in the US are rare.

> 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?

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.

Being a good developer and being a scammer are completely uncorrelated variables.

Someone can be a good developer and also be a scammer. I don't understand why you think this is hilarious or weird.

Is it so hard to believe that someone can be a great candidate in an interview when you're getting 100% of their attention and then be horrible at their job when you're getting 20% of it because they're juggling 5 jobs?

I have seen that in employment paperwork at a few companies. Generally, you just mention you have side jobs and they okay it. Or you ignore it entirely and nobody notices.

Employment contracts that are reduced to a single explicit written agreement are relatively rare in the US, most employment contracts are implied by conduct.

> If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people

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.

I think Google has that.

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.

I think an copyright/IP assignment contract is standard in many or most U.S. software jobs, at least when working for a big enough company that they have a lawyer who handles the NDA/employment paperwork.

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).

Wow, that's interesting. I didn't know that.

Fascinating. My locality is usually kinda lax but it's something that we have.

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.

A lot of people think of "contract" as specifically a written document, but that's not what a "contract" is in law, the written document (if it exists) can be very powerful evidence that (1) there is a contract, and (2) what its terms are, but contracts exist without them.

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.

You just described why consulting makes big bucks

> effectively claw back your gains from scamming

Do you really think several busy startups are going to band up and sue a person (esp in California)?

It's hilarious because companies use such scammable ways to define who is "top 0.1%"

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

> Being a good developer and being a scammer are completely uncorrelated variables.

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.

> Employment contracts in the US are rare.

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?

It’s probably because the interview process relied heavily on leetcode questions. If it did, one can effectively prepare for that and only that and can be overemployed.

Is it still common to ask leetcode questions during interview?

I don't doubt he's in the 1% or 0.1% of candidates you're interviewing, but there is one very simple solution startups could apply to make it easier to find top talent -> remove "US ONLY" from their job listings.

> 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).

It's not about need, it's about beating the system. The "hack".

The “need” of beating the system. Good developers may or may not have a lower deficit of “it”.

> 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).

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.

> Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge.

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.

Leetcode questions are still the primary way to test skill in interviews.

You might not be aware, but hiring outside of the country causes a whole slew of other points of friction and complexity. It actually isn't "one very simple solution" in practice, which is why many startups don't do it.

A large percentage of U.S. software jobs (and probably nearly all YCombinator startups) are in California. Other states might be different, but stuff you do outside of work doesn't automatically become your employer's IP in California.

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.

Where? I have candidates solve a real closed-ended problem in the space we’re working in. I also give them a lot of source code to read and respond to and find issues with.

Yes, really.

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.

Exactly. It's so bleak that this industry throws integrity out the window in the name of productivity.

I think this is a US specific thing.

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.

For established companies, I've always had a written employment agreement which discussed some terms common to all employees, including anti-moonlighting, usually ip assignment, etc. But I don't think I've ever had a contract that described what I going to do... maybe when I worked for a school district, but there my position title didn't actually match the work anyway; the position title was about being a tech helper in the classroom, but my position was at the district office with field work that only rarely had interaction with students.

That's what happens when you hire bad contractors. There are so many bad contractors and selection bar for contractors is much lower compared to employees.

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).

I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard.

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.

Oh so you’re not American but you’re explaining how obvious it is that American companies should hire outside of America

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?

> he's actually a very skilled engineer

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.

US tech salaries are so much higher [at tech companies] that it closes much of the gap on how much more you could earn in a consulting arrangement.

Well. Was George Santos an anomaly or proving of a hypothesis? If the hypothesis were structured like so:

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.

You can do anything - the question is whether you'll get caught and then whether you'll get punished. Does the employer have anything to gain by suing the employee in these cases?

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.

IMO being a good corporate developer is not very correlated with being a good "hacker" (finding ways to exploit systems). They may be correlated a little but not very. Being a good startup founder is probably correlated with being a good hacker, much more than being a good corporate developer is. Startups have to find and exploit niches.

I am shocked, and FWIW so is my wife (Czech) and my elderly mum.

Source: anonymous account created one day ago.

k

most medium to large size companies

With due respect, they probably just asked leetcode-esque and sys design questions.

> Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates

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.

Yes: US salary costs include having to pay healthcare fees (it’s not universal here), so work contracted prices are generally discounted by that amount relative to salaries.

he had no proof he can code, no projects, no github, only hired because he gave them a lowball offer, it was lowball because he was scamming

You say this like you can just talk with the VP and CFO and have a nuts and bolts conversation about big systems things as an pre-hire IC. You can't negotiate with even medium-sized companies at that level. They have a fixed idea of what the 'role' looks like, and almost always it's full-time, long-term. You can negotiate maybe 10-25% salary increase, but that's it. Good luck even getting more PTO (the "standard" amount is always "generous" and if you got more it would complicate "team dynamics").

The had 100 candidates and hired him. Top 1% QED. (/s)

What was your interview process like? I think that would be helpful information in helping design a better vetting procedure to avoid this in the future.

There’s literally no evidence they did either of these things. I really hope these companies can explain their hiring process as it reflects badly on them that they keep calling him top 0.1% without any explanation of their process.

No explanation has been provided to show hes good at leetcode either.

I wanted to explain from a purely economic perspective why if you want a consulting role instead of a full-time job, you will likely be paid much less.

What good is a contract if you can’t prove what its terms are? Such a contract is worth the paper it’s printed on.

I assume its because his resume showed hes worked at sexy startups recently (true or not)

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

I think these might soon be called Soham clauses, to be a bit cheeky.

Consulting often pays way more than salaries every do.

What type of interview you have, I presume non LeetCode style?

This is what we call a hustler.

Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t, but keeping the myth going even if it comes with bad stories is valuable.

> You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)

Familiar to fans of HBO's _Silicon Valley_!

That being said, "employment contract" colloquially connotes more than "agreement to trade labor for X salary." It implies something other than at-will employment, for one thing.

Like a cheater and a jerk. Doesn't matter how talented someone is, if they're too arrogant, then the no *sshole rule means they must adapt to expectations or find somewhere else.

If they're so talented, then they should probably work on their own thing.

Or work at Meta or Microsoft and make $600k-950k and become a sr production engineer or principal engineer quickly.

Being disloyal and breaking trust and reputation for temporary gain is crazy.

Companies don't want contractors because they're perceived as (and often are) unreliable. Lower pay won't fix that, and a good hiring manager won't let someone weasel their way through that with this kind of prestidigitation.

I'm worried people are going to start going after burnt out employees thinking they're over employed because it looks the same from the outside and there's no way to prove a negative.

I don't think anyone has the morals or trust anymore for the way we used to do corporate work.

Lol because foreigners aren't known for being scammers.

>Or work at Meta or Microsoft and make $600k-950k

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.

In the US it's not uncommon to have a $200k base. Not even taking into account stock compensation and benefits, you'd need to command about $400/hr contracting to fit your 4x figure. Does that sound comparable to your setup?

The OP said he blew interviews out of the water. Presumably they mean technical interviews, that's how he proved he can code. By writing code.

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.

I've seen a lot more employed shitty devs than I've seen unemployed amazing devs. In fact I don't know a single competent developer who has trouble getting work.

This is in Norway, maybe it's different elsewhere.

> I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer.

> 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.

In the same way that driving Uber pays more than driving for a taxi company: Not as much when you factor in your own expenses (taxes, insurance, etc) and non-billable work.

This field would be so much better off good engineering meant being good at following through on projects instead of being good at gaming interviews.

I don't know about the person you're asking, but I have known many people (both programmers and consultants in other areas like marketing, game design, etc.) who billed at more than that hourly rate, here in Europe (where salaries don't commonly go above $200k).

You're replying to a quote about where their skill falls compared to others, and then saying it's wrong based on their contribution to the company. You're not wrong that it means they aren't top 1% in terms of value as an employee, but it's a separate topic to the quote you're replying to.

I'm intrigued by this guy, he could only have a few years of experience. What does he have to show for it resume wise? Has he ever built something, oversaw a large project, contributed meaningfully - and does he back this well in his interviewing?

Uber doesn't pay more than a job as a taxi driver as far as I know (take home).

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.

My observation of the situation in Germany is different: I know quite some quite skilled developers who have/had quite some trouble getting jobs.

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".

> If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?

There is a high risk that the AI bubble will collapse.

Where did you hear this? People on X said the exact opposite.

Do companies not call references or former places of employment anymore? I am surprised he kept the scam so long when these jobs could've just called his previous work who'd tell them a story like you said.

A disinterested Richard Feynman is a better physicist than a very interested highschooler. Skill and value extraction are not the same thing.

But this approach takes a certain amount of time and effort, and requires interviewers who are skilled at interviewing.

Leetcode provides an extremely lazy and cheap way of “solving” the problem of assessing an applicant’s skills.

There’s low correlation between success and ability once you hit a baseline.

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.

you wouldn't and he wouldn't get past me, lots of devs don't have personal projects? That is a good filter, give me the ones with higher agency that do. Maybe my standards are too high. I usually contribute the most lines at work, and have personal projects that helped get me the job in the first place.

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.

Maybe Earth could stop policing entire populations (a very profitable enterprise) of various ecosystems and return to policing the small percentage of the population that abuses the ecosystem for their own selfish gain? Generally, a small percentage of any population abuses the ecosystem and creates restrictions for the population as a whole. Fix THAT problem, and you solve a myriad of other related problems for entire populations. Character questions are forbidden in the USA as they might lead to 'discrimination.' But 'discrimination' is where one discerns a preference between something desirable and something undesirable? Historically the abuse of 'discrimination' created the legal restrictions that foster this situation where a candidate's character cannot be assessed accurately. Soham proves that the people doing the interviewing are less discerning than they believe themselves to be. Good character seldom is discerned during an interview. Also 'good' character relative; what 'Christians' or 'Westerners' consider to be good character is different from what other cultures accept or tolerate. In summary, caveat emptor.

Technical interviews and answering system design questions do not prove you can code. This is for a founding engineer position. When I started in the industry in 2014, I had to explain the architecture decisions of my side projects. Now people parrot information off the web and call it proof of code.

Contractors like CEOs send clear signals they refuse self exploitation and are willing to exploit others .

I am like you, I'm someone that can happily code for eight straight hours on task and then happily jump to a side project afterwards in a totally different language / domain. Take it for the single point of data that it is, but: I have met equally as many high performers who do NOT code at home as I have mediocre ones that did. And the number of programmers who code solely on the job is far, far more common than those who take their work home with them. Statistically speaking, at least in my personal experience, that makes the at-home coder notably worse on average. As someone that used to think like you, I think the only thing you're really doing is the boys-club-esque equivalent of what the old Ivy League managers used to do (Oh, he's from MIT! That's perfect, we only hire MIT grads here). You're hiring what you know because you understand people with that background more.

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.