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

I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process. This guy is one more piece of evidence. He knew what hiring managers wanted to hear, and used that to get in the door.

My advice to companies is to stop chasing unicorns and 10x engineers. Intentionally try to hire ordinary average engineers. Your company making a SaaS app doesn’t need talented programmers, it just needs ordinary ones.

Ego leads founders to chase top 1% talent in some cases. In other cases the product is terrible but they think hiring an amazing programmer will pull them out of the dive. It won’t. Just hire normal people and build normally.

There is obviously some distribution of productivity in software developers. In young startups, a highly productive developer has an outsized impact. A delay in product development can mean the company is entirely blocked from advancing its growth. The cost of a “slow” developer can become the entire burn rate of the company, as everyone waits for X to be finished. A more productive developer has a better chance of staying ahead of the critical path.