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.

No.

First of all we are developers only. Calling ourselves engineers is a sociopathic lie. Almost none of us are capable of doing anything that resembles engineering.

The problem with software is permissive tolerance of gross incompetence. I have been doing this for 20 years in the corporate world and can easily say 15% of the workforce knows what they are doing. The rest is reliant on other things to do it for them: open source applications, frameworks, toolkits, AI. The problem with industry wide incompetence is that solution delivery is slow, piecemeal, and extremely narrow in scope.

It really doesn’t take much to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x developer multiple times. It typically means I learn to do the full 8 hours worth of work in less than 2 hours so that I can play games all day. The work delivered tends to be far more durable and execute substantially faster so nobody asks many questions. It’s not that I’m smart. It’s that my peers just do the same stupid shit over and over without asking questions because they are getting by with imposter syndrome.

Employers need to occasionally hire a 10x developer otherwise they are going to be hiring outside firms to fill that gap.

I have to say this treating other engineers as God attitude is really weird.

Other engineers make horrendous mistakes too. Other engineers just get by too.

If you think a piece of paper means really a lot, then so be it.