The real problem is that companies say they want 10x engineers but they don't even pay 2x if you deliver outsized value compared to your peers. If you create a culture of high performance with associated high compensation, you'll find that engineers will spend their free time working on company problems rather than side-hustles.
There's a risk-adjusted payoff, at least in theory. A 10x doesn't get paid 10x, but also doesn't get immediately fired if the project shuts down, gets paid when sick, doesn't get paid 30% less if company revenues go down.
At least in Europe. I guess in US it's all different.
I thought the premise was that he’s an exceptional interviewer (and maybe good engineer), but did no work so as to eventually get pip-ed and laid off. If he was exceptional at getting work done, then you’re right and a lot of the critique is misplaced. Would love to be corrected if that was indeed the case
"good at the job" is elusive and vaguely defined in most companies. They want you be a part of the company and get excited for the product and invest all of your focus in it. It's an unwritten rule but it's there. People who just do the job are not promoted and are looked down upon, in my experience.
I wish it was just doing the job, it should be that way unless you are on commission or one of the owners
Let me rephrase: this would be interesting if he acquired and succeeded at several high-demand jobs. He did not. It is therefore not that interesting of a story.
Doesn’t sound like it. A tweet says he’s was smart and likable and only let go because they found he was moonlighting. Another tweet says he was a really good coder.
> It turns out that Parekh did quite well in many of these interviews and received offers, largely because he’s a gifted software engineer.
> For instance, Rohan Pandey, a founding research engineer of the YC-backed startup Reworkd, told TechCrunch that he interviewed Parekh for a role and he was a strong candidate. Pandey, who is no longer with the startup, says Parekh was one of the top three performers on an algorithms-focused interview they gave candidates.
An employee on salary is different from a consultant on hourly rate. Essentially, the employee is an ally whom all the intellectual output is retained and will be paid in full regardless of their performance.
By all accounts Parekh did not fulfill his obligation, apparently he is a very good engineer, but he did not give his time to the companies he was hired by. He was constantly calling sick, fail to finish his tasks up until got fired. Since he was a salaried employee, he still received the paycheck despite his abysmal performance.
That said, he definitely became a folk hero :) He is a charming person who pulled a fascinating stunt.
>>Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty.
>>Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.
Also
>>Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.
So the case of an Overemployed engineer who signs an exclusivity deal and works 8 hours at one job and then 8 hours at another job, is still breach of contract, the employee is not well rested, the focus is literally split in half, and there's also concerns of mixing and polluting IP claims.
What's more, the Soham Parekh case is an even clearer case of breach and even fraud, it's not like the dude was fulfilling or apparently fulfilling his obligations, he never worked, first week he took the week off and lied about why, just 0 output but still trying to get that first paycheck.
There is a subtler discussion on OverEmployment, but this is not it, we should all agree that this is fraud.
He's an Ai marketing scheme by some y-combo felons. Top-to-bottom, pre-planned commercial to distract from the copyright issues central to everyone's mind, the recent ruling on which only served to further illegitimize US courts, highlighting obvious conflicts of interest, skirting due process, and making every citizen question the efficacy of the current Republic and constitution in regards to protecting our personal liberties.
Trying to run three marathons at the same time will only keep you from finishing any of them. You can show up for the photo or just the final mile, but that only proves who you really are!
It's very hard on other people, who, in some cases, are making tremendous efforts, such as running marathons again, due to these types of people...
I don't mean to be rude, but a "Marathon" ? What world are you living in ?
Most tech-jobs are boring-as-hell bullshit jobs that are required to deal with stupidly designed systems whose phil. is stuck in the dark-ages of PDP-10 (which is why a lot of it gets shipped off to India, or not to 'AI').
I really think people need a hobby or something. Cool we found the 99th percentiler of a thing that everyone knows was happening. All it is is someone who's phenomenally good at interviewing and decided to use that to defraud a bunch of companies.
Is there much else to learn? This is simply not as interesting a story as it's being made out to be.
If someone legitimately interviews well and then just decides to stop working, what exactly does that say about the founders/recruiting teams? Literally nothing. Interviews are hackable by bad actors who then incur a bunch of cost to get rid of after the fact -- not news.
Use your judgement. I do most of my filtering before the interview, from the resume and LinkedIn. Get references from his last company. If something feels off, probe some more. You develop a nose for it.
IF you're trying to say that you've interviewed people like Soham in a roundabout way you can just say so. Given everyone else's reaction, they're obviously new to these scammers and will be adjusting their hiring practices.
Not everybody has interviewed a North Korean hacker with a real-time deepfake avatar either...
I am not saying that at all, am I? I am saying DO BACKGROUND CHECKS. If the previous company says "He hasn't actually done any work yet" you would have avoided the problem.
I can't tell you what to do differently because I don't know what you are doing. But I can say you can catch him, and others have caught him, so why can't you?
First, background checks are obvious and I don't know any startup of any scale that's hiring engineers "without background checks."
But typical background checks would not catch someone doing this, and in fact did not catch him several times, clearly.
Background checks do not alert you to other business who claim to have recently hired someone, so it's not clear how this helps whatsoever. He had references, he had a LinkedIn, etc. etc. Your solution is made up.
If you believe background checks would help, then answer my prior question: which type of background check? The standard ones would not detect this!
If you really didn't want your employees moonlighting, maybe you should just pay them more so that they don't have to work 5+ jobs at the same time? (Of course they won't) and require them to be in the office.
But this is the archetype of engineer that companies really want: Exceptional at passing technical interviews, willing to work 24/7 to make it happen, but as cheap as possible but all made up for promising 'equity'.
This is an actual "10x engineer" that exists, but somehow it has upset some VCs because he was moonlighting at multiple companies as a hack.
The best part is, remote YC startups were targeted and they are all talking about banning Soham secretly on bookface.
It is now clear that some are "allowed" to hack the system of others to their advantage but you are "not allowed" to do it against YC.
How do SV equity grant agreements work? I assume that even if he had cliff vested his initial tranche, there’s still a way for the company to cancel or repurchase vested shares if a “for cause” situation existed?
I'm probably in the minority here: when I was a manager, I was always totally fine with my employees moonlighting. Even if they didn't tell me and I found out later (as I did in one case). The only thing I've really cared about is whether they did good work.
I believe the main reason employers have an issue with moonlighters is that they view it as lack of loyalty. There may be other reasons, such as concerns regarding whether the employee can perform at 100% at two or more jobs, but I really do think that loyalty is the primary concern by a large margin.
I wouldn't call it loyalty. I would say that it's more about assymetrical dependency, even if it's a subconscious thing. A lot of managers/bosses want the employees to be dependents of the job.
In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract, meaning it’s breach of contract to do paid work for another company at the same time. The typical agreement being made by an employer is salary in return for the employee’s full time attention, where full time means ~40 hours of work per week, or sometimes more. As a manager I do care if my employees work significantly less than full time and devote that time to other paying jobs, especially if they do good work. That’s opportunity cost; if they could be producing more in the ~40 hrs/week agreement we have, they’re cheating the company and violating the agreement they made. I don’t care if they do hobby work or open source projects in their spare time, if they’re fulfilling their agreed upon obligations.
I guess you’re lucky, TYL. Just checking since most people don’t read their employment contracts carefully - have you actually checked for exclusivity clauses? Are you talking about full time engineering work, or something else? Exclusivity clauses are less common for part time work, contract work, and labor jobs. I’ve seen both exclusivity clauses and non-compete clauses for multiple jobs, both at large established companies (e.g. Disney) and for smaller startups.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and a bunch of others famously got busted colluding to avoid hiring from each other, and the employment contracts at the time also had exclusivity clauses. I know because mine did, and I received a payout from the settlement of that lawsuit.
Ok, but if I have L7 vision and skills, but get hired as a L4, and can complete my work in 10h/week, what right does the company have to demand more than that? It sounds like a mismatch between level/salary and skills. If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn't that what the company hired them for? We aren't talking about officer-level positions here.
> If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn’t that what the company hired them for?
Generally speaking, no. Full time jobs are supposed to be full time, and the expectation, and explicit agreement the employee signed up for, is that employees will apply their skills for 40h/week regardless of level, vision, or skills.
Have you read your employment contract and/or employee handbook? You probably have one or both of those even if you don’t know it, but if you don’t have one of those, have you asked your employer what they think about this, whether they agree to let you work 10h/week and keep your full salary if you can “complete” your work? It sounds funny to me to even say it that way. At no time in my life has there been a specific set of tasks and work per week after which I could say my work was complete, software engineering doesn’t work like that.
Again, the right the company has to demand your full time attention is that was the agreement you signed up for: salary in return for 40h/week of your best effort.
I don’t think L7 can do 40 hours of L4 work in 10 hours. In my experience L7 can do things L4 cannot do in principle, no matter how much time they have. This makes their time more valuable.
I think you were not a very good software manager. Let me explain why.
You need to treat the performance of your programmers as opaque, you shouldn't trust your ability to gauge their performance.
Suppose you buy a novel, and you buy it thinking that it was written by an 80year old Author that traveled the world and learned a lot of experiences and was actually a genius and a seductor of women and was a philantropist that rubbed shoulders with politicians.
If you then learn that the novel was actually written by a ghostwriter in china, or by ChatGPT, then would the value of the Novel be the same? No, it would be almost worthless, the content of the novel is the same, if you inspect the product you would not be able to tell the difference. Sometimes the value, or indicators of the value, are in the process.
Stepping back out of the metaphor, the product will show its true value 2, 5 10 years down the line, will it crash when the marketing team figures it out, or you have a viral moment and 100K concurrent users?
You cannot rely solely on the inspection of the deliverables, you must assume that there are invisible or hard to inspect properties that are almost impossible to divine from inspecting the deliverable, but easier to understand by inspecting the talent and process that builds it.
The question is not "Who is Soham Parekh?" but "Where is Soham Parekh Now?"
The real problem is that companies say they want 10x engineers but they don't even pay 2x if you deliver outsized value compared to your peers. If you create a culture of high performance with associated high compensation, you'll find that engineers will spend their free time working on company problems rather than side-hustles.
There's a risk-adjusted payoff, at least in theory. A 10x doesn't get paid 10x, but also doesn't get immediately fired if the project shuts down, gets paid when sick, doesn't get paid 30% less if company revenues go down.
At least in Europe. I guess in US it's all different.
Remember, the rules are always different for capital holders, the professional managerial class, and labor.
haven’t met a tech CEO who didn’t have at least 3 jobs. conflicts of interest be damned.
If the guy is good at the job, why does it matter? Maybe we should think of him more like a folk hero than a criminal.
I thought the premise was that he’s an exceptional interviewer (and maybe good engineer), but did no work so as to eventually get pip-ed and laid off. If he was exceptional at getting work done, then you’re right and a lot of the critique is misplaced. Would love to be corrected if that was indeed the case
"good at the job" is elusive and vaguely defined in most companies. They want you be a part of the company and get excited for the product and invest all of your focus in it. It's an unwritten rule but it's there. People who just do the job are not promoted and are looked down upon, in my experience.
I wish it was just doing the job, it should be that way unless you are on commission or one of the owners
*edit: assuming he did the job that is..
He sucked at the job (made excuses for being behind on everything). Very good at interviewing.
This isn't really true based on at least one account that is noted in the article: https://x.com/mprkhrst/status/1940443347581337925
"Really smart and likable; enjoyed working with him"
People generally don't enjoy working with people who suck at their job.
>People generally don't enjoy working with people who suck at their job.
That's news to me. Fabulous news even. Not sure when this change took place but it's for the better.
Let me rephrase: this would be interesting if he acquired and succeeded at several high-demand jobs. He did not. It is therefore not that interesting of a story.
Doesn’t sound like it. A tweet says he’s was smart and likable and only let go because they found he was moonlighting. Another tweet says he was a really good coder.
> It turns out that Parekh did quite well in many of these interviews and received offers, largely because he’s a gifted software engineer.
> For instance, Rohan Pandey, a founding research engineer of the YC-backed startup Reworkd, told TechCrunch that he interviewed Parekh for a role and he was a strong candidate. Pandey, who is no longer with the startup, says Parekh was one of the top three performers on an algorithms-focused interview they gave candidates.
That is exactly in line with what I just stated.
I realize this is an employee-centric forum, but playing devils advocate, if these are otherwise good employers, why does it matter?
he isn't, he commits fraud by not delivering and lying about why there are no results.
An employee on salary is different from a consultant on hourly rate. Essentially, the employee is an ally whom all the intellectual output is retained and will be paid in full regardless of their performance.
By all accounts Parekh did not fulfill his obligation, apparently he is a very good engineer, but he did not give his time to the companies he was hired by. He was constantly calling sick, fail to finish his tasks up until got fired. Since he was a salaried employee, he still received the paycheck despite his abysmal performance.
That said, he definitely became a folk hero :) He is a charming person who pulled a fascinating stunt.
Joel Spolsky explained this to me in
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
>>Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty. >>Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.
Also
>>Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.
So the case of an Overemployed engineer who signs an exclusivity deal and works 8 hours at one job and then 8 hours at another job, is still breach of contract, the employee is not well rested, the focus is literally split in half, and there's also concerns of mixing and polluting IP claims.
What's more, the Soham Parekh case is an even clearer case of breach and even fraud, it's not like the dude was fulfilling or apparently fulfilling his obligations, he never worked, first week he took the week off and lied about why, just 0 output but still trying to get that first paycheck.
There is a subtler discussion on OverEmployment, but this is not it, we should all agree that this is fraud.
He's an Ai marketing scheme by some y-combo felons. Top-to-bottom, pre-planned commercial to distract from the copyright issues central to everyone's mind, the recent ruling on which only served to further illegitimize US courts, highlighting obvious conflicts of interest, skirting due process, and making every citizen question the efficacy of the current Republic and constitution in regards to protecting our personal liberties.
Trying to run three marathons at the same time will only keep you from finishing any of them. You can show up for the photo or just the final mile, but that only proves who you really are!
It's very hard on other people, who, in some cases, are making tremendous efforts, such as running marathons again, due to these types of people...
Some athletes literally run and finish ultra marathons that are longer than three regular marathons.
https://www.wser.org/
What's the incentive to finish the marathon? 0.05% of a 1% chance of a billion dollars?
I don't mean to be rude, but a "Marathon" ? What world are you living in ?
Most tech-jobs are boring-as-hell bullshit jobs that are required to deal with stupidly designed systems whose phil. is stuck in the dark-ages of PDP-10 (which is why a lot of it gets shipped off to India, or not to 'AI').
The article mentions startups where you have to help create or develop an actual product, and a scam artist.
Source?
Soham Parekh, hired by Suhail, Adish, Rohan, Sanjit, et al.
>how could this have happened
... and Flo, Matt, and some dude named Haz. Did that not fit your narrative?
[flagged]
I really think people need a hobby or something. Cool we found the 99th percentiler of a thing that everyone knows was happening. All it is is someone who's phenomenally good at interviewing and decided to use that to defraud a bunch of companies.
Is there much else to learn? This is simply not as interesting a story as it's being made out to be.
Probably the reaction is because of who (whom?) he defrauded: some YC founders. People have higher expectations for them, I think.
If someone legitimately interviews well and then just decides to stop working, what exactly does that say about the founders/recruiting teams? Literally nothing. Interviews are hackable by bad actors who then incur a bunch of cost to get rid of after the fact -- not news.
It means you need to be diligent when interviewing people; do background checks.
What sensible level of background check would've caught this without incurring stupid costs given that 99.99999% of applicants are not Soham?
Use your judgement. I do most of my filtering before the interview, from the resume and LinkedIn. Get references from his last company. If something feels off, probe some more. You develop a nose for it.
Got it, so seems like there's nothing to learn here, like I said initially.
IF you're trying to say that you've interviewed people like Soham in a roundabout way you can just say so. Given everyone else's reaction, they're obviously new to these scammers and will be adjusting their hiring practices.
Not everybody has interviewed a North Korean hacker with a real-time deepfake avatar either...
No, I am asking what is there to learn. If there were something to learn, you (or anyone else) could’ve said: “you should do [this thing] differently”
“Don’t hire people like this guy” is circular. It’s not meaningful information. There’s nothing to learn!
Background checks would not and did not detect him.
I am not saying that at all, am I? I am saying DO BACKGROUND CHECKS. If the previous company says "He hasn't actually done any work yet" you would have avoided the problem.
I can't tell you what to do differently because I don't know what you are doing. But I can say you can catch him, and others have caught him, so why can't you?
First, background checks are obvious and I don't know any startup of any scale that's hiring engineers "without background checks."
But typical background checks would not catch someone doing this, and in fact did not catch him several times, clearly.
Background checks do not alert you to other business who claim to have recently hired someone, so it's not clear how this helps whatsoever. He had references, he had a LinkedIn, etc. etc. Your solution is made up.
If you believe background checks would help, then answer my prior question: which type of background check? The standard ones would not detect this!
Ask about his work! Everybody specifically said he did not actually do any.
Ah, so you are supposed to conjure from the tea leaves all of the employers he has burned and hasn't listed on his LinkedIn or references. Gee wiz.
I've known people who did this. It didn't make a lot of sense, but they seemed to like the optionality of not being tied down to one place.
If a 100x engineer works 10 jobs, does he then become a 10x engineer at each job?
If you really didn't want your employees moonlighting, maybe you should just pay them more so that they don't have to work 5+ jobs at the same time? (Of course they won't) and require them to be in the office.
But this is the archetype of engineer that companies really want: Exceptional at passing technical interviews, willing to work 24/7 to make it happen, but as cheap as possible but all made up for promising 'equity'.
This is an actual "10x engineer" that exists, but somehow it has upset some VCs because he was moonlighting at multiple companies as a hack.
The best part is, remote YC startups were targeted and they are all talking about banning Soham secretly on bookface.
It is now clear that some are "allowed" to hack the system of others to their advantage but you are "not allowed" to do it against YC.
> It is now clear that some are "allowed" to hack the system of others to their advantage but you are "not allowed" to do it against YC.
That party will last until the regulators notice...
During interviews, he said he preferred equity over salary.
Bold strategy given how most vesting cliffs work. He was betting on not being caught for a year.
How do SV equity grant agreements work? I assume that even if he had cliff vested his initial tranche, there’s still a way for the company to cancel or repurchase vested shares if a “for cause” situation existed?
I'm probably in the minority here: when I was a manager, I was always totally fine with my employees moonlighting. Even if they didn't tell me and I found out later (as I did in one case). The only thing I've really cared about is whether they did good work.
I believe the main reason employers have an issue with moonlighters is that they view it as lack of loyalty. There may be other reasons, such as concerns regarding whether the employee can perform at 100% at two or more jobs, but I really do think that loyalty is the primary concern by a large margin.
I wouldn't call it loyalty. I would say that it's more about assymetrical dependency, even if it's a subconscious thing. A lot of managers/bosses want the employees to be dependents of the job.
In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract, meaning it’s breach of contract to do paid work for another company at the same time. The typical agreement being made by an employer is salary in return for the employee’s full time attention, where full time means ~40 hours of work per week, or sometimes more. As a manager I do care if my employees work significantly less than full time and devote that time to other paying jobs, especially if they do good work. That’s opportunity cost; if they could be producing more in the ~40 hrs/week agreement we have, they’re cheating the company and violating the agreement they made. I don’t care if they do hobby work or open source projects in their spare time, if they’re fulfilling their agreed upon obligations.
> In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract
In 25 years of professional work in tech over several employers, I’ve never seen such a clause.
I guess you’re lucky, TYL. Just checking since most people don’t read their employment contracts carefully - have you actually checked for exclusivity clauses? Are you talking about full time engineering work, or something else? Exclusivity clauses are less common for part time work, contract work, and labor jobs. I’ve seen both exclusivity clauses and non-compete clauses for multiple jobs, both at large established companies (e.g. Disney) and for smaller startups.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and a bunch of others famously got busted colluding to avoid hiring from each other, and the employment contracts at the time also had exclusivity clauses. I know because mine did, and I received a payout from the settlement of that lawsuit.
Ok, but if I have L7 vision and skills, but get hired as a L4, and can complete my work in 10h/week, what right does the company have to demand more than that? It sounds like a mismatch between level/salary and skills. If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn't that what the company hired them for? We aren't talking about officer-level positions here.
> If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn’t that what the company hired them for?
Generally speaking, no. Full time jobs are supposed to be full time, and the expectation, and explicit agreement the employee signed up for, is that employees will apply their skills for 40h/week regardless of level, vision, or skills.
Have you read your employment contract and/or employee handbook? You probably have one or both of those even if you don’t know it, but if you don’t have one of those, have you asked your employer what they think about this, whether they agree to let you work 10h/week and keep your full salary if you can “complete” your work? It sounds funny to me to even say it that way. At no time in my life has there been a specific set of tasks and work per week after which I could say my work was complete, software engineering doesn’t work like that.
Again, the right the company has to demand your full time attention is that was the agreement you signed up for: salary in return for 40h/week of your best effort.
I don’t think L7 can do 40 hours of L4 work in 10 hours. In my experience L7 can do things L4 cannot do in principle, no matter how much time they have. This makes their time more valuable.
I think you were not a very good software manager. Let me explain why.
You need to treat the performance of your programmers as opaque, you shouldn't trust your ability to gauge their performance.
Suppose you buy a novel, and you buy it thinking that it was written by an 80year old Author that traveled the world and learned a lot of experiences and was actually a genius and a seductor of women and was a philantropist that rubbed shoulders with politicians.
If you then learn that the novel was actually written by a ghostwriter in china, or by ChatGPT, then would the value of the Novel be the same? No, it would be almost worthless, the content of the novel is the same, if you inspect the product you would not be able to tell the difference. Sometimes the value, or indicators of the value, are in the process.
Stepping back out of the metaphor, the product will show its true value 2, 5 10 years down the line, will it crash when the marketing team figures it out, or you have a viral moment and 100K concurrent users?
You cannot rely solely on the inspection of the deliverables, you must assume that there are invisible or hard to inspect properties that are almost impossible to divine from inspecting the deliverable, but easier to understand by inspecting the talent and process that builds it.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44448461