Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley can't stop hiring?

If the guy is good at the job, why does it matter? Maybe we should think of him more like a folk hero than a criminal.

He sucked at the job (made excuses for being behind on everything). Very good at interviewing.

Doesn’t sound like it. A tweet says he’s was smart and likable and only let go because they found he was moonlighting. Another tweet says he was a really good coder.

This isn't really true based on at least one account that is noted in the article: https://x.com/mprkhrst/status/1940443347581337925

"Really smart and likable; enjoyed working with him"

People generally don't enjoy working with people who suck at their job.

>People generally don't enjoy working with people who suck at their job.

That's news to me. Fabulous news even. Not sure when this change took place but it's for the better.

Let me rephrase: this would be interesting if he acquired and succeeded at several high-demand jobs. He did not. It is therefore not that interesting of a story.

> It turns out that Parekh did quite well in many of these interviews and received offers, largely because he’s a gifted software engineer.

> For instance, Rohan Pandey, a founding research engineer of the YC-backed startup Reworkd, told TechCrunch that he interviewed Parekh for a role and he was a strong candidate. Pandey, who is no longer with the startup, says Parekh was one of the top three performers on an algorithms-focused interview they gave candidates.

That is exactly in line with what I just stated.

An employee on salary is different from a consultant on hourly rate. Essentially, the employee is an ally whom all the intellectual output is retained and will be paid in full regardless of their performance.

By all accounts Parekh did not fulfill his obligation, apparently he is a very good engineer, but he did not give his time to the companies he was hired by. He was constantly calling sick, fail to finish his tasks up until got fired. Since he was a salaried employee, he still received the paycheck despite his abysmal performance.

That said, he definitely became a folk hero :) He is a charming person who pulled a fascinating stunt.

I thought the premise was that he’s an exceptional interviewer (and maybe good engineer), but did no work so as to eventually get pip-ed and laid off. If he was exceptional at getting work done, then you’re right and a lot of the critique is misplaced. Would love to be corrected if that was indeed the case

"good at the job" is elusive and vaguely defined in most companies. They want you be a part of the company and get excited for the product and invest all of your focus in it. It's an unwritten rule but it's there. People who just do the job are not promoted and are looked down upon, in my experience.

I wish it was just doing the job, it should be that way unless you are on commission or one of the owners

*edit: assuming he did the job that is..

he isn't, he commits fraud by not delivering and lying about why there are no results.

Joel Spolsky explained this to me in

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

>>Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty. >>Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.

Also

>>Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.

So the case of an Overemployed engineer who signs an exclusivity deal and works 8 hours at one job and then 8 hours at another job, is still breach of contract, the employee is not well rested, the focus is literally split in half, and there's also concerns of mixing and polluting IP claims.

What's more, the Soham Parekh case is an even clearer case of breach and even fraud, it's not like the dude was fulfilling or apparently fulfilling his obligations, he never worked, first week he took the week off and lied about why, just 0 output but still trying to get that first paycheck.

There is a subtler discussion on OverEmployment, but this is not it, we should all agree that this is fraud.

I realize this is an employee-centric forum, but playing devils advocate, if these are otherwise good employers, why does it matter?