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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?

#231

Post by kjkjadksj »

rpcorb wrote: post #216
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.

When people with no integrity or ethics defraud their employers, "it's life"?

How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.

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

#233

Post by kjkjadksj »

Aurornis wrote: post #74
jasonthorsness wrote: post #6

He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing

You the phrase about how when something becomes a metric it ceases to be a useful measure because everyone starts gaming it? The same goes for hiring tricks. When some hiring signal becomes a trick that gets passed around by influencers, it ceases to become a useful hiring signal because everyone is gaming it. If this guy started advertising his process, everyone would start doing his process and it would stop workin…

You can proselytize all you want for thousands of years and you will never convert the whole world at once.

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

#234

Post by mpeg »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #206
mpeg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt he's in the 1% or 0.1% of candidates you're interviewing, but there is one very simple solution startups could apply to make it easier to find top talent -> remove "US ONLY" from their job listings.

You might not be aware, but hiring outside of the country causes a whole slew of other points of friction and complexity. It actually isn't "one very simple solution" in practice, which is why many startups don't do it.

I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard.

1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service

2. You can also not hire them, and use their services as independent contractors instead. I've never had an issue doing this with my finance teams, as long as the contractor submits a valid invoice they don't care who they are. Plus, it's good for cashflow (net 30 to net 90 is pretty standard) and the hire gets a nice tax save on their end.

I do understand that at large companies it can be tricky, but IMHO at startups there is little excuse. I suppose it all doesn't matter if you're playing with unlimited silicon valley VC money, I've only ever had to deal with european investors and they love a bit of smart frugality.

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

#235

Post by altairprime »

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.

It doesn’t necessarily take 18 hours a day to do two full-time jobs for a full workday. Certainly I’ve never spent longer than three weeks doing 16h/day! I don’t advise it.

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

#236

Post by sorcerer-mar »

mpeg wrote: post #234
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not be aware, but hiring outside of the country causes a whole slew of other points of friction and complexity. It actually isn't "one very simple solution" in practice, which is why many startups don't do it.

I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard. 1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service 2. You can also not hire them, and use their se…

Oh so you’re not American but you’re explaining how obvious it is that American companies should hire outside of America

I agree if I had the UK talent pool domestically, European investors, a different health insurance regime, and existed in a different timezone, the calculus might be different.

Aside: how many people were at the company where you were paying recruiters $25k to find people?

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

#237

Post by aristofun »

gargoyle9123 wrote: post #23

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…

> he's actually a very skilled engineer

By that you mean more like "he is top 0.1% at leetcode and whatever broken hiring process we have" ?

Why would really top 0.1% engineer go for all the hustle with small startups. If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?

This doesn't add up at all, sorry.

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

#238

Post by pxc »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #233
Aurornis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You the phrase about how when something becomes a metric it ceases to be a useful measure because everyone starts gaming it? The same goes for hiring tricks. When some hiring signal becomes a trick that gets passed around by influencers, it ceases to become a useful hiring signal because everyone is gaming it. If this guy started advertising his process, everyone would start doing his process and it would stop workin…

You can proselytize all you want for thousands of years and you will never convert the whole world at once.

It also doesn't matter if his tricks stop being effective if he can still sell them effectively. He doesn't care about integrity, clearly, so that wouldn't be a problem for him.

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

#239

Post by mh- »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #224
tomp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think this is a US specific thing. I work as a contractors with all my clients (who know of each others) and they all pay significantly more per hour compared to an employee. As an employee I could expect to make 1/4 of what I actually make. The only exception in this arrangement was when I worked with an US company, they wanted to hire me as an employee and paid 1k per month to some company in my country just to h…

US tech salaries are so much higher [at tech companies] that it closes much of the gap on how much more you could earn in a consulting arrangement.

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

#240

Post by Teever »

cardanome wrote: post #177
distances wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how two full time contracts could even work out in Europe. Surely they both can't pay the social security contributions, pension etc? Also don't most work contracts expressly prohibit taking a second job, with the reasoning that the company expects employees to rest so they stay productive in the main job? It's hard to get a 130K job in EU but it's easy to reach and exceed that as an independent contractor,…

Here in Germany you are currently only allowed to work 48hours per week. Also there are strict laws for companies to actually track work time. So it is absolutely impossible for someone here to have two full time jobs without committing working time fraud. But even if you could, it would make literally no sense two have jobs as you earn vastly more with freelancing anyway. You would scam yourself. The most optimal mo…

Really? Like, in Germany it's illegal for someone to have a full-time job doing software and then a side business making soap and selling it at a farmer's market on the weekend?

That's... peculiar.

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