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

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

#41

All anecdotes I see about this dude is: "we hired him and he did a fantastic job, but once we found out he had multiple employment we fired him". ... why? If the guy's doing well by all metrics and not leaking IP, literally, who cares?

I saw several anecdotes that were: “when he did the job, it was great, but he rarely did the job because there was always someone sick, meeting with a lawyer, or any excuse to not deliver”.

So I think that finding about multiple employment is actually about realizing he was lying the whole time with the excuses.

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

#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.

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

#43

We hired Soham. I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well. The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more r…

> The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.

I worked with an overemployed person (not Soham). It was exactly like this.

Started out great. They could do good work when they knew they were in focus. Then they started pushing deliverables out farther and farther until it was obvious they weren't trying. Meetings were always getting rescheduled with an array of excuses. Lots of sad stories about family members having tragedies over and over again.

It wears everyone down. Team mates figure it out first. Management loses patience.

Worst part is that one person exhausts the entire department's trust. Remote work gets scrutinized more. Remote employees are tracked more closely. It does a lot of damage to remote work.

> Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good.

I doubt it's a dev shop because the dev shops use rotating stand-ins to collect the paychecks, not the same identity at every job. This guy wanted paychecks sent directly to him.

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.

> He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.

Wild to be cutting work trial days in half to do other jobs. Although I think he was also testing companies to see who was lenient enough to let him get away with all of this.

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

#44

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…

Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?

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.

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

#45

Bigger question is do you think he really wants everyone on the Internet targeting him one way or another? Why didn't he get the option to remain an anonymous scandal? We don't need to know his name to discuss his actions.

The purpose of sharing his name was to warn other companies, not to discuss the story.

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

#46

All anecdotes I see about this dude is: "we hired him and he did a fantastic job, but once we found out he had multiple employment we fired him". ... why? If the guy's doing well by all metrics and not leaking IP, literally, who cares?

None of the anecdotes I saw say that.

All of them say he did good work when he was working, but it was obvious that he was trying to do it as a part-time job.

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

#47
post #3

This is my question too. I'm no longer job searching but every interview involved multiple steps and "background checks." I'm seeing the dude's resume has him working half a dozen jobs in a year which even to me is a huge red flag. Then he has a github with automated commits... I don't want to be disparaging to start ups because its brutal out there but how does someone like that have such a high success rate? Is he…

On Twitter some of the founders discussed this. He would give references to people who answered the phone and then praised his work generically. One person said they thought it was strange that both of his reference checks seemed like really young guys, but it's the startup world so they overlooked it.

There was one Tweet from someone who said they did a reference check from someone who said he did good work when he was working, but he was working multiple jobs at the same time so he wasn't working much. Maybe he assumed his references wouldn't be checked often, and maybe he was right?

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

#48

We hired Soham. I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well. The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more r…

Do employment contracts in the US not normally have "sole focus" clauses? We have those in my location.

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

#50

We hired Soham. I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well. The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more r…

> The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying. I worked with an overemployed person (not Soham). It was exactly like this. Started out great. They could do good work when they knew they were in focus. The…

> 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?

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