Have You Hired Techie Developer Soham Parekh Yet?

Startups have narrowed hiring into structured calls and take-home tasks

- PANKAJ MISHRA

A few days ago, Soham Parekh was just another full-stack developer. Then his name began surfacing across founder circles: Hacker News threads, Slack channels, Twitter jokes, Reddit threads. One YC-backed startup after another realized they'd hired him. Not in sequence—at the same time.

Some found out after a few weeks. One team said he worked with them for nearly a year. The stories converge on the same arc: stellar interviews, fast onboarding, some early output. Then missed meetings. Odd excuses. Gaps in availability. In one case, Soham turned up for a trial in person, then left halfway through the day, saying he had to meet a lawyer.

He didn't disappear. He just kept showing up somewhere else. The question isn't how he got away with it. The question is why it was so easy.

Soham Parekh is not the first engineer to work multiple jobs in parallel. In November 2022, Vanity Fair published a piece titled "Overemployed in Silicon Valley: How Scores of Tech Workers Are Secretly Juggling Multiple Jobs." It told of engineers quietly holding down two, three, even four full-time roles. Some used mouse-jigglers to fake activity. Others ran multiple laptops. One admitted to outsourcing work to Fiverr. A few worked in coordinated Discord communities, sharing tactics.

"I'm not sure if they even know I'm here anymore," one engineer told the reporter. "All my paychecks are still coming in."