One engineer, many jobs and a hiring reckoning for tech

Over this week, both Reddit and X were on fire over an Indian engineer named Soham Parekh.

- Shweta Taneja

On Wednesday Suhail Doshi, a San Francisco-based founder associated with the Y Combinator accelerator startup community, posted a tweet about the engineer, with a word of caution. “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.

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.