1 engineer, many jobs and a hiring reckoning for tech

"He works at 3-4 startups at the same time and has been preying on YC companies. Beware," Suhail Doshi posted, adding a screenshot of the person's resume. Within a few hours, his X blew up with other startup founders posting that they had hired or fired Soham Parekh. At least five founders accused the engineer of moonlighting-or job stacking, a practice of working multiple full-time remote jobs concurrently.

- Shweta Taneja

As tweets tumbled one after the other, many founders revealed they had met the engineer online and were impressed in the interview before they hired him. “He did so incredibly well in interviews, must have a lot of training,” wrote Flo Crivello, another founder based in San Francisco, adding that the lesson they learnt from this was to always run backdoor checks and spend more time scrolling Twitter. “He has been doing this for years and works at more than four startups at any given time,” wrote Nicolai Ouporov posting an email from the engineer. “We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and let him go,” wrote New York-based Matthew Parkhurst, joking that hiring Soham seems to be the new rite of passage for startups in San Francisco. Another founder wrote how they had interviewed Parekh in a WeWork and then saw him giving an interview to another startup in the same coworking space. Gerry Tan, president and CEO of YCombinator, posted a meme of Scooby Doo catching a thief. “The startup guild of YC is a necessary invention to help founders be more successful that they would be alone,” he joked. As the controversy tumbled into a meme, a fake Parekh account blossomed on X and people starte