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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?

#311

Post by austin-cheney »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #291

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 founder…

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.

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

#312

Post by krageon »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #184
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…

> 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…

Companies don't want contractors because they're perceived as (and often are) unreliable. Lower pay won't fix that, and a good hiring manager won't let someone weasel their way through that with this kind of prestidigitation.

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

#313

Post by punkbit »

Do these teams know about version control? It’s quite simple to see who’s doing actual work and contributing…

Some claims he was brilliant, doing exactly what? Copying and pasting LLM output?

Did he participate in any hourly, daily technical conversations? Did he replied to others quick enough? Do these teams even know how to use slack, discord, etc? Are they having video meetings all the time and only person speaking like a podcast maybe?

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

#314

Post by joshuanapoli »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #291

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 founder…

There is obviously some distribution of productivity in software developers. In young startups, a highly productive developer has an outsized impact. A delay in product development can mean the company is entirely blocked from advancing its growth. The cost of a “slow” developer can become the entire burn rate of the company, as everyone waits for X to be finished. A more productive developer has a better chance of staying ahead of the critical path.

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

#315

Post by chanux »

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.

> to have your coworker pretending to be working.

I don't think this is uncommon.

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

#316

Post by chanux »

nickip wrote: post #55
dazzeloid wrote: post #10

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…

How was he talented? All the stories are the same. "Talented" etc. But then it leads to he never did any work. How can you assess his talent?

https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/pol/fraud/resistance.html

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

#317

Post by Ylpertnodi »

distances wrote: post #157
tkiolp4 wrote: post #132

Honestly, it’s the way I’m planning to go. Not 4 simultaneous full time jobs, but 2 (or one fulltime job and 2 contractor part time jobs). Reason: it’s easier to pass the interview for less demanding jobs (not faang, not second level faang), they are less demanding in the day to day (no “exceeds expectations”, “meets expectations”, “under expectations”, just simply “good job Joe!” and “shit happens Joe”), they are us…

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,…

>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?

The eu contracts I've had (and seen) usually restrict you working for competitors. Never seen one that actually promotes 'rest', as a restriction on unpaid time.

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

#318

Post by astura »

avmich wrote: post #17
the_real_cher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I worked with a guy who wasn't even "over employed" but was working on some big side project at home.

He would blow off any meeting before noon. Just wouldn't show up.

His work was usually late and rushed/poor quality. Lots of corners cut. Oftentimes he didn't even get something right the first time because he didn't have the full context because he missed discussion that happened in the meetings he didn't show up to.

He was full of shit. Every day he was having some personal tragedy. Excuse after excuse.

He started trouble with teammates in a way I've just never seen before.

He was just all around a net negative even though he occasionally did decent work. Everyone was happy to see him go.

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