Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs? • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by oceanplexian » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

ponector wrote: post #98

Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber. It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs. I had the same experience as you with an "overemployed" person: Working with…

> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs What blows my mind is people think overemployment of an engineer is bad, but it is more than acceptable for CEO to held top positions in different companies.

CEOs get fired too when a board with sufficient power doesn’t feel like they are performing.

The difference is in most cases the CEO owns the business or a good chunk of it so they’re actually capital owners and employees in name only. If you own the business you make the rules.

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

#182

Post by kgwgk » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #180

kgwgk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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”.

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

#183

Post by timeon » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:33 PM UTC

dalemhurley wrote: post #42

This is insane, there is a Reddit, of course there is, of almost 500K people, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ , who discuss all of the strategies to do this. Just imagine being one of the people who legit joins a startup, is passionate, working long hours, earning your vest, to have your coworker pretending to be working.

Taking current state of Reddit, with all the rage-bait and other sorts of creative writing, I wonder how much of that is legit content.

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

#184

Post by aleph_minus_one » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #179

gyomu wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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…

> 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.

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

#185

Post by skeeter2020 » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #82

thepasswordis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people assessing his talent are falling for the same delusion as the people conducting the interview.

If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.

in fairness to some interview processes there are ways you could legit pass a valid interview and then short change the job. We do a problem scenario / proposed solution that's shared a few days in advance. Good candidates (and good frauds) can ace this with strong technical skills, relevant experience and maybe an hour or so of prep time. We'd take this as strong signal, because (and I'd hope more companies do this) we're optimizing for talented candidates, not minimizing people who are going to work multiple concurrent jobs.

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

#186

Post by aleph_minus_one » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #71

gyomu wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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 b…

> 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.

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

#187

Post by __s » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

freefaler wrote: post #161

altairprime wrote: post #108

I did two full-time jobs for a month as part of changing jobs fifteen years ago and it’s exceedingly intense but otherwise was fine; eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have. Employers don’t like this because that’s a lot of work they could have persuaded an employee to provide as unpaid overtime labor instead; much this outrage is simple jealousy. If you’re doing the…

24-18 = 6 hours "non-working" time. Eating, washing and shitting is min 1 hour/day.So 5 hours of bed time with around 4.75 hrs of sleep at most, because we don't fall asleep right away. The math doesn't work long term. It may be kept for 1-2 months even when a person is 21 yrs old, but I doubt it it can be sustained more than that.

They said 18 waking hours, not working hours

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

#188

Post by FireBeyond » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

voidUpdate wrote: post #143

cardanome wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be a gambling addiction

That's a hell of a gambling addiction when he's making about 10 times what I am. You'd think you'd stop if you were just flushing that money down the toilet and not winning anything from the gambling

About twenty years ago there was a story in Melbourne, of a young foreign student at the casino.

He withdrew $1,000 from the ATM from his home back in Asia. Was duly given the cash. He noticed though, that looking at online banking, his balance hadn't changed. Odd, but maybe it was a vagary of international transactions (and again, 20+ years ago).

Nope. So he took out another $1,000. And another. Every time, got the money, no transaction posted.

Not just one ATM, any.

Over the course of 2 years when it all came out, he had gotten $2M+ from this.

Know how he got caught? He took some of that money gambling. And sat at a table all night, constantly replenishing his stash. That tipped off the casino that something was odd, because they had loaded the ATM with $250K, which usually lasted ~48h, but he emptied out in a few. "Didn't we fill this this afternoon?".

Once they got the financial institutions it was also fairly quickly revealed.

And in court, the local banks admitted that there had been nothing flagged in their system, and presumably it would have kept working until (at least) his card expired.

There you have a literal money printing machine, and "No, let's see what I can win gambling". I suppose here's other factors like "Maybe it's easier to launder a big winning" but nonetheless, it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling.

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

#189

Post by Finnucane » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

tuckerpo wrote: post #90

KeplerBoy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.

Anecdotally I'd argue that it's not just "plenty", but the majority of people who only work one single job barely and/or pretend to work. I regularly see Principal+ engineers, VPs and Directors waddling around looking important or just staring at their monitors with a glazed over look. Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, w…

This is why there’s a push to the four day workweek. People get just as much done, they just use their time more efficiently.

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

#190

Post by skeeter2020 » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

gk1 wrote: post #60

avmich wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...

People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber. I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their…

This is a really good perspective, and I've seen a similar impact from "under employed" members of my teams. We have group-level product managers who have several scrum team-level PMs under them. The idea is they keep broader alignment and bigger-picture consistency, but when they don't spend time with each of the scrum teams, or miss planning meetings and important discussions the teams pay the price from lack of communication, coordination and a shared understanding.