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

291 points jshchnz | 1 comments | 02 Jul 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.258s | source

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?

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dazzeloid ◴[02 Jul 25 21:39 UTC] No.44449134[source]▶
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)

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the_real_cher ◴[02 Jul 25 21:55 UTC] No.44449255[source]▶
Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?
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Aurornis ◴[03 Jul 25 05:42 UTC] No.44451975[source]▶
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.

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1. pwthornton ◴[05 Jul 25 16:22 UTC] No.44473754[source]▶
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.