I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.
Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good. He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.
> The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.
I worked with an overemployed person (not Soham). It was exactly like this.
Started out great. They could do good work when they knew they were in focus. Then they started pushing deliverables out farther and farther until it was obvious they weren't trying. Meetings were always getting rescheduled with an array of excuses. Lots of sad stories about family members having tragedies over and over again.
It wears everyone down. Team mates figure it out first. Management loses patience.
Worst part is that one person exhausts the entire department's trust. Remote work gets scrutinized more. Remote employees are tracked more closely. It does a lot of damage to remote work.
> Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good.
I doubt it's a dev shop because the dev shops use rotating stand-ins to collect the paychecks, not the same identity at every job. This guy wanted paychecks sent directly to him.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
> He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.
Wild to be cutting work trial days in half to do other jobs. Although I think he was also testing companies to see who was lenient enough to let him get away with all of this.
> However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
What a silly waste of his time and reputation (in addition to other people's).
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?
> 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 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).
I work as a contractors with all my clients (who know of each others) and they all pay significantly more per hour compared to an employee.
As an employee I could expect to make 1/4 of what I actually make.
The only exception in this arrangement was when I worked with an US company, they wanted to hire me as an employee and paid 1k per month to some company in my country just to hire me. An insane waste of money, not to mention taxes on my side.
Yes: US salary costs include having to pay healthcare fees (it’s not universal here), so work contracted prices are generally discounted by that amount relative to salaries.
In the US it's not uncommon to have a $200k base. Not even taking into account stock compensation and benefits, you'd need to command about $400/hr contracting to fit your 4x figure. Does that sound comparable to your setup?
I don't know about the person you're asking, but I have known many people (both programmers and consultants in other areas like marketing, game design, etc.) who billed at more than that hourly rate, here in Europe (where salaries don't commonly go above $200k).
>
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 job.
So both involved sides get a part of the pie that is negotiated about, and has to compromise on another aspect.
You say this like you can just talk with the VP and CFO and have a nuts and bolts conversation about big systems things as an pre-hire IC. You can't negotiate with even medium-sized companies at that level. They have a fixed idea of what the 'role' looks like, and almost always it's full-time, long-term. You can negotiate maybe 10-25% salary increase, but that's it. Good luck even getting more PTO (the "standard" amount is always "generous" and if you got more it would complicate "team dynamics").
I wanted to explain from a purely economic perspective why if you want a consulting role instead of a full-time job, you will likely be paid much less.
In the same way that driving Uber pays more than driving for a taxi company: Not as much when you factor in your own expenses (taxes, insurance, etc) and non-billable work.
Uber doesn't pay more than a job as a taxi driver as far as I know (take home).
The take home pay after carrying more expenses probably makes it worse.
Uber sells demand for transport. They don't own the transport and the burden of owning, and maintaining the transport is pushed on to freelancers, who have less certainty of income than they would as employees might.
Theres been lots written about the insecurity to employment that is created by more things offering gig jobs on one hand but not always ending up also offering part time or full time positions.
From the customers side, apps like Uber provide a sense of certainty (visual map) that existing industries haven't been willing to invest the same kind of capital into and those apps as a result are not comparable or inviting.
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.
> 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?
I've worked with several small contracting businesses, including some that came highly recommended.
They were all very inefficient relative to having someone in-house. They also came with the problem that institutional knowledge was non-existent because they had a rotating crew of people working for you.
Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge. The companies he applied for specifically did not want to contract the work out to a body shop.
That's what happens when you hire bad contractors. There are so many bad contractors and selection bar for contractors is much lower compared to employees.
If you keep your standards high when hiring contractors you'll get the same level of quality you have with employees.
Contractor agencies are also pretty happy to have long lasting clients (I have been with my current clients respectively for: 4 years, 3 years, 1 years and 1 month).
>
Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge.
Then make it part of the contracting deal that the contractors have to give the in-house people sufficient training about the code/project that they worked on.
> I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
It is hilarious that companies that hired a guy who was scamming them are also convinced they are great at assessing the skill level of devs.
Is it so hard to believe that someone can be a great candidate in an interview when you're getting 100% of their attention and then be horrible at their job when you're getting 20% of it because they're juggling 5 jobs?
The OP said he blew interviews out of the water. Presumably they mean technical interviews, that's how he proved he can code. By writing code.
Lots of devs don't have personal projects. I love programming but after spending the whole day programming I don't particularly want to go home and continue programming.
you wouldn't and he wouldn't get past me, lots of devs don't have personal projects? That is a good filter, give me the ones with higher agency that do. Maybe my standards are too high. I usually contribute the most lines at work, and have personal projects that helped get me the job in the first place.
With agentic coding on the rise, it's easier to make a side project after a year of nights and weekends.
Nobody wants to go home and make a project that proves to future employers you can do the job, everybody wants to get paid though.
I am like you, I'm someone that can happily code for eight straight hours on task and then happily jump to a side project afterwards in a totally different language / domain. Take it for the single point of data that it is, but: I have met equally as many high performers who do NOT code at home as I have mediocre ones that did. And the number of programmers who code solely on the job is far, far more common than those who take their work home with them. Statistically speaking, at least in my personal experience, that makes the at-home coder notably worse on average. As someone that used to think like you, I think the only thing you're really doing is the boys-club-esque equivalent of what the old Ivy League managers used to do (Oh, he's from MIT! That's perfect, we only hire MIT grads here). You're hiring what you know because you understand people with that background more.
You might find on the opposite end of the spectrum that someone with a perfectly equal skillset is laughing at the idea of taking on personal projects when he can just optimize for getting hired somewhere where they prioritize paying you to learn on the job.
Technical interviews and answering system design questions do not prove you can code. This is for a founding engineer position. When I started in the industry in 2014, I had to explain the architecture decisions of my side projects. Now people parrot information off the web and call it proof of code.
It's hilarious because companies use such scammable ways to define who is "top 0.1%"
Also there's a ton amazing engs out there who want and need work but the companies all only want that one "perfect" guy (or gal), as if such a thing exists
I've seen a lot more employed shitty devs than I've seen unemployed amazing devs. In fact I don't know a single competent developer who has trouble getting work.
This is in Norway, maybe it's different elsewhere.
My observation of the situation in Germany is different: I know quite some quite skilled developers who have/had quite some trouble getting jobs.
The other hand, the bad developers (impostors) who easily found jobs were typically sycophants. On the other hand, many highly skilled developers were rather more stubborn (they can't stand bullshit), very honest, and not "corporate politicians".
There’s low correlation between success and ability once you hit a baseline.
There’s an element of chance, and stuff like leetcode is just a veneer of science over a vibe based process, which conveniently scopes out management culpability. Personally, I think it’s hilarious that Silicon Valley types have essentially enshrined civil service exams for hiring.
IMO being a good corporate developer is not very correlated with being a good "hacker" (finding ways to exploit systems). They may be correlated a little but not very. Being a good startup founder is probably correlated with being a good hacker, much more than being a good corporate developer is. Startups have to find and exploit niches.
There’s literally no evidence they did either of these things. I really hope these companies can explain their hiring process as it reflects badly on them that they keep calling him top 0.1% without any explanation of their process.
One of them didn’t. They just said they have the best system to pick candidates, that they’ve learned at their respective FAANG places, and that it can’t fail.
> I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer.
> Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
People who regularly don't show up for work are by definition not "top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates" - in fact quite the opposite.
That'll get you fired from PetSmart, let alone some bullshit $250k/yr software job.
I think startups' freewheeling management and hiring practices need examined because this would be caught by the most basic of background or reference checks at any traditional business.
Can't wait for Paul Graham's next essay on "How to Not Hire People Who Smoke Crack In the Toilets Instead of Showing Up for Work" for more informative life lessons.
You're replying to a quote about where their skill falls compared to others, and then saying it's wrong based on their contribution to the company. You're not wrong that it means they aren't top 1% in terms of value as an employee, but it's a separate topic to the quote you're replying to.
we interviewed him and passed. he was horrible. it blows my mind seeing these reports of him crushing interviews and being a great dev. the bar for programmers is woefully low. on second thought there's got to be more to this story because he came to us through a recruiter who talked him up big time. did he come to you through a recruiter too? if so then either the recruiter is in on it or he has an army of different recruiters getting him in front of yc people. also you say you worked with him in person but other reports say he was in india. something not adding up here. i can verify my story by giving you the Nth character of the quirky email address he uses. can you do the same?
It’s probably because the interview process relied heavily on leetcode questions. If it did, one can effectively prepare for that and only that and can be overemployed.
Where? I have candidates solve a real closed-ended problem in the space we’re working in. I also give them a lot of source code to read and respond to and find issues with.
I'm intrigued by this guy, he could only have a few years of experience. What does he have to show for it resume wise? Has he ever built something, oversaw a large project, contributed meaningfully - and does he back this well in his interviewing?
By that you mean more like "he is top 0.1% at leetcode and whatever broken hiring process we have" ?
Why would really top 0.1% engineer go for all the hustle with small startups. If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?
How do you measure that ? It seems like he wasn't a good candidate after all. I hope y`all learn a lesson about hiring and moving away from things that aren't signal to a job.
I think an copyright/IP assignment contract is standard in many or most U.S. software jobs, at least when working for a big enough company that they have a lawyer who handles the NDA/employment paperwork.
That pretty much automatically rules out over employment because you can’t separately promise two different companies that you’re assigning all software copyrights to them rather than you, it’s an incompatible contract (even if it’s limited to work hours - you’re pretending to both companies that you’re working 9-5 solely for them).
A large percentage of U.S. software jobs (and probably nearly all YCombinator startups) are in California. Other states might be different, but stuff you do outside of work doesn't automatically become your employer's IP in California.
There are some nuances and I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of it is that three ways to trigger the IP to attach to your employer:
1. You do it on-prem or during work hours (but work hours are flexible for salaried employees)
2. You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)
3. It's reasonably related to what you or other people do at your day job
If none of those apply, then you own it. That's relevant to the discussion at hand because, at least in California, you could work from home for two companies with unrelated businesses and not break any rules.
You can do anything - the question is whether you'll get caught and then whether you'll get punished. Does the employer have anything to gain by suing the employee in these cases?
All successful big tech businesses - all of them - got that way by openly breaking laws. They don't trigger automatically, but upon a manual review, triggered by someone with at least a couple grand to spend on the endeavour. A lot flies under the radar in practice.
I have seen that in employment paperwork at a few companies. Generally, you just mention you have side jobs and they okay it. Or you ignore it entirely and nobody notices.
Fascinating. My locality is usually kinda lax but it's something that we have.
I would have thought that with the litigious culture in the US and non-competes etc... this would all be watertight. Seems kinda ridiculous that with a non-compete you can't work for a competitor once you've quit but you're free to do so while you still work for your employer, lol.
Employment contracts that are reduced to a single explicit written agreement are relatively rare in the US, most employment contracts are implied by conduct.
A lot of people think of "contract" as specifically a written document, but that's not what a "contract" is in law, the written document (if it exists) can be very powerful evidence that (1) there is a contract, and (2) what its terms are, but contracts exist without them.
While US employment is usually at will without a defined contract term, there are mutually enforceable obligations, including some definition of what the employee is obligated to do for the employer and that the employer is obligated to pay the employee at some specified rate assuming the employee's obligations are met. That's a contract. Exactly what the detailed terms are may be difficult to prove absent a single comprehensive written document, but it is a contract.
That being said, "employment contract" colloquially connotes more than "agreement to trade labor for X salary." It implies something other than at-will employment, for one thing.
They do print the terms on paper. Usually, companies that don’t have a formal contract that both the employee and employer sign will still write down all the important information. First the employer sends an offer letter containing important information unique to the new employee, such as job title, compensation, work location, start date, etc. Then everything else is in some kind of employee handbook. The handbook details the expectations for every job title, the rules employees are expected to follow, rules for promotions and transfers, etc, etc. Together these have everything you would expect in a contract that both the employee and employer sign, and they are just as binding.
It’s not really rare, plenty of companies in the US use employment contracts. But a majority don’t, not in the European sense. Technically there is always a contract between any two parties who are cooperating; it doesn’t have to be formalized in any particular way as long as the cooperating parties have a common understanding of the terms and agree on them.
Many companies that don’t use formal contracts instead put all the information that is common to all employees into an employee handbook, and the details that are unique to a specific employee into the offer letter. The offer letter given to a new hire has details such as their starting salary and start date, and once they arrive they are given a copy of the handbook and often time to read it and discuss it with a manager. The handbook will explain in detail how promotions happen, the work expected from for various job titles, any rules the employees are expected to follow, etc, etc. Together these form the common understanding that underlies the contract, even if there is never a formal contract signed by both the employer and the employee.
Contractors, on the other hand, always have a formal contract. Often a contractor spends a significant amount of their time negotiating these contracts, especially the scope of work. I should know, I worked as a contractor for many years.
For established companies, I've always had a written employment agreement which discussed some terms common to all employees, including anti-moonlighting, usually ip assignment, etc. But I don't think I've ever had a contract that described what I going to do... maybe when I worked for a school district, but there my position title didn't actually match the work anyway; the position title was about being a tech helper in the classroom, but my position was at the district office with field work that only rarely had interaction with students.
I'm worried people are going to start going after burnt out employees thinking they're over employed because it looks the same from the outside and there's no way to prove a negative.
I don't think anyone has the morals or trust anymore for the way we used to do corporate work.
Maybe Earth could stop policing entire populations (a very profitable enterprise) of various ecosystems and return to policing the small percentage of the population that abuses the ecosystem for their own selfish gain?
Generally, a small percentage of any population abuses the ecosystem and creates restrictions for the population as a whole. Fix THAT problem, and you solve a myriad of other related problems for entire populations.
Character questions are forbidden in the USA as they might lead to 'discrimination.' But 'discrimination' is where one discerns a preference between something desirable and something undesirable?
Historically the abuse of 'discrimination' created the legal restrictions that foster this situation where a candidate's character cannot be assessed accurately.
Soham proves that the people doing the interviewing are less discerning than they believe themselves to be. Good character seldom is discerned during an interview. Also 'good' character relative; what 'Christians' or 'Westerners' consider to be good character is different from what other cultures accept or tolerate.
In summary, caveat emptor.
Like a cheater and a jerk. Doesn't matter how talented someone is, if they're too arrogant, then the no *sshole rule means they must adapt to expectations or find somewhere else.
If they're so talented, then they should probably work on their own thing.
did you notice any hints of him cheating on the interview with LLMs? If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people
> If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people
If you can get and hold dozens of concurrent full-time engineering jobs by scamming people, you can get much further much more quickly than is possible in any one of the full-time engineering jobs you can get.
This is obviously unethical, relies on non-guaranteed success, and falls apart if people are able to effectively claw back your gains from scamming, but that's not (obviously) enough to outweigh the desire for quick returns for some people.
Well. Was George Santos an anomaly or proving of a hypothesis? If the hypothesis were structured like so:
If we have a pile of shit, surely shit eaters will be attracted to it
In which case George Santos is just a very testable hypothesis (it's like watching a 5 year old walk up to a cookie jar when the adults are gone). Congress attracts a certain type. What did you attract and why is an unavoidable question. In fact, it's scientific. You would think tech people would recognize the locust of non technical people entering the industry as some kind of an indicator, some measurable thing ...
We need to run more formal scientific experiments to document what happened in this industry.
What was your interview process like? I think that would be helpful information in helping design a better vetting procedure to avoid this in the future.
Do companies not call references or former places of employment anymore? I am surprised he kept the scam so long when these jobs could've just called his previous work who'd tell them a story like you said.
I don't doubt he's in the 1% or 0.1% of candidates you're interviewing, but there is one very simple solution startups could apply to make it easier to find top talent -> remove "US ONLY" from their job listings.
You might not be aware, but hiring outside of the country causes a whole slew of other points of friction and complexity. It actually isn't "one very simple solution" in practice, which is why many startups don't do it.
I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard.
1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service
2. You can also not hire them, and use their services as independent contractors instead. I've never had an issue doing this with my finance teams, as long as the contractor submits a valid invoice they don't care who they are. Plus, it's good for cashflow (net 30 to net 90 is pretty standard) and the hire gets a nice tax save on their end.
I do understand that at large companies it can be tricky, but IMHO at startups there is little excuse. I suppose it all doesn't matter if you're playing with unlimited silicon valley VC money, I've only ever had to deal with european investors and they love a bit of smart frugality.
Oh so you’re not American but you’re explaining how obvious it is that American companies should hire outside of America
I agree if I had the UK talent pool domestically, European investors, a different health insurance regime, and existed in a different timezone, the calculus might be different.
Aside: how many people were at the company where you were paying recruiters $25k to find people?
Being employed in four companies is obviously not sustainable, but half of that is fairly common.
I know several people who spent months working for two companies: one full time, the other part time. The most productive few would reach two full time positions and actually keep delivering for over a year.
The reason this happens at all is that sufficiently large organisations expect performance to be in a specific range - if it's too low you'll be fired, but going the extra mile will not yield benefits, as your compensation is decided by the assigned budget and promotions are rare.
Case in point: a few years ago my former co-worker was given "overtime" which was actually a hidden raise, as management really wanted to keep him, but couldn't officially increase his compensation. The organisation for which we worked eventually cracked down on such practices, so he left to work at a place which would compensate him this much and more without resorting to such tricks.
THIS. Companies establish the minimum level of productivity acceptable by keeping the lowest performer. There's very little benefit in producing much beyond that level in most organizations. What do you do with all the extra time if you're a superstar? You could give it to your employer for free or sell it on the open market by acquiring another job and profiting off your own performance.
Having a side hustle or even excessively volunteering isn't much different in terms of workload. A lot of people do this. It's always the meetings that are the hard part.
Your definition of common is likely not the same as most people's. If this even broke 1 in a thousand I would be in awe. Most folks can't even keep up with their single job and life (family obligations and what not). Managing multiple is not something that will cross their mind.
That's an interesting way to put it. I was overemployed from 2021 to 2024. I worked two full-time start-up jobs (well, a W2 job and a full-time contract position that was for all intents and purposes a full-time W2 job, just that it paid me without the deductions and such). When one company shut down, I continued doing contract work but not at a full-time capacity.
During my tenure at both companies, my higher-ups liked my performance so much that when it was time to select people for raises/promotions/rate increases etc, I was among the few selected. I took this as a sign that my half-performance was valued enough to earn me more money so I wanted to stay like this forever. Alas, it didn't.
I'm extremely fortunate that everyone was pretty flexible. If I couldn't make a daily standup (or whatever regular meeting), I'd just say I can't make it and no one would ask why. Same if I had to leave a meeting early. As long as I got my stuff done, no one complained.
And really, that's what I appreciated the most. I'd happily work for either single one of these companies simply because they just respected everyone's time and treated everyone like adults. I acknowledge that I was technically taking advantage of this trust by working a separate job, but I cannot stress enough how happy my employers were with my half-performance. So as you mentioned, it's either give full-performance to one company for half-pay (or well, regular pay I guess), or give half-performance to two companies for double-pay. The economics made perfect sense, and because the companies felt good about the value they were getting from me for their money, I didn't feel guilty.
But it did make me think -- how many other people are giving full-performance to a company when half-performance would be satisfactory, if not exemplary? Especially now in the age of AI where many people are more productive than ever, why couldn't companies consider a full work-week 20 hours a week instead of 40, if they can still extract the same value? I think most individuals would be so much happier to work under those circumstances, and if they wanted to fill in the rest of the 20-hour week with another job they could, and not have to play this game.
I mean, the obvious answer is obvious, but a guy could dream.
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 founders to chase top 1% talent in some cases. In other cases the product is terrible but they think hiring an amazing programmer will pull them out of the dive. It won’t. Just hire normal people and build normally.
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.
One effect is a fresh set of eyes. When I started my last job I immediately reorganised a pile of stuff in useful ways just based on my previous job - which made up for not knowing anything about the local lay of the land as yet. It can give your first few months a real perception boost!
> I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process.
This is what makes this story so funny. A lot of people are mad at the guy that found an exploit in the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system without a lick of ire directed at the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system.
Like if everybody’s profile on a dating app said “only interested in talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger”, then somebody’s eventually going to get catfished by a fake Kindergarten Cop. It’s kind of a “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” situation
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.
I honestly don't understand that, as well. I am a real engineer on paper and now do full-time software development. The funny thing is, "real" engineers mostly think that programming computers is like doing magic. Meanwhile, many software developers think that "real" engineers are somehow special..
> 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.
What if you did engineering before and just moved to software engineering because that somehow pays more than the noble profession of engineering?
Much like many attorneys that instead choose the less noble profession of police officer. Yes, that does happen, but it’s not the scenario that most software people consider when arbitrarily choosing such lofty false titles. Most software people were never licensed electrical/mechanical/civil engineers.
I don't think anyone who hired him has any future credibility when it comes to hiring
* "He's a great engineer" - Yet he's ineffective at doing the job and touch fired him?
* "He's top 0.1%" - Of what exactly? How can it be the case when you fired him?
You literally didn't do reference checks properly and you got caught out. And it's all written like these companies are the victims. You're better off admitting that you don't know how to hire.
Soham's behaviour is one thing, but working for any of these companies he was at is a literal red flag.
We hired him — and plenty of other great engineers after who didn’t pull his stunt.
You never really know what someone will do after they’re onboarded, even if they ace the interviews. When people say he’s a good engineer, they mean he crushed pair programming and skill tests. When he actually showed up, he did good work. Problem was he was juggling so many jobs he was always making excuses as to why he wasn't available. And he wasn’t upfront as to why.
We do reference checks. But when someone kills your interviews, you have to move fast or risk losing them to another offer. Time kills deals - and the best candidates usually get multiple offers. Waiting for every reference isn’t always an option. Most people are ethical, so you trade some risk for speed. In Soham’s case, one reference checked out, the other never replied. A few unaffiliated references said they remembered him from previous stops on the resume but hadn't worked with him directly.
If someone starts making excuses right away or seems off, it’s your job to cut them loose fast. Most companies did just that.
The amount of people saying “yeah he’s a great engineer” with the only supporting piece of evidence being “he cracked our leetcode interviews” is bonkers.
Hiring is completely broken in a lot of tech. Getting the right companies on your resume early on — regardless of your skills — makes you a made person. And then if you know how to game interviews, you’ll be double made.
@sama's Triple Byte ostensibly tried to "solve" this and did nothing but make it worse. As a candidate, they lied to me saying "I had the 'best' score ever on their screening process". Ironically, I ended up at Meta where the interviewing process is somewhat like Google's but now even more difficult technically.
Realize that a lot of candidates who followed the rules and told the truth were screwed out of jobs. Right now there are massive layoffs and lots of good people are out of jobs and this guy is being praised by sticking it to “corporate greed”?
Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?
> "Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?"
You say that like you're unaware that huge numbers of people (I doubt anywhere near a majority, but significant numbers certainly) DO think that he is a hero who deserves to be pardoned.
Wow that escalated quickly. I'm just saying why would an engineer who's been rewarded a seat at a company based on his leetcode abilities think that the company cares about anything else.
It's the surest signals of overrated candidates who lead with egos rather than results and an overrated hiring process with easily-fooled people who can't see it.
I'm no longer job searching but every interview involved multiple steps and "background checks."
I'm seeing the dude's resume has him working half a dozen jobs in a year which even to me is a huge red flag. Then he has a github with automated commits... I don't want to be disparaging to start ups because its brutal out there but how does someone like that have such a high success rate? Is he taking a super low salary or something?
On Twitter some of the founders discussed this. He would give references to people who answered the phone and then praised his work generically. One person said they thought it was strange that both of his reference checks seemed like really young guys, but it's the startup world so they overlooked it.
There was one Tweet from someone who said they did a reference check from someone who said he did good work when he was working, but he was working multiple jobs at the same time so he wasn't working much. Maybe he assumed his references wouldn't be checked often, and maybe he was right?
To add to this. It would be great to see which companies he interviewed at but didn't get the job. Would argue those companies have better BS-detectors conducting the interviews.
For my last job — the guy who was supposed to verify my permanent address called me and asked me to ask someone in my village to take a photo of the house with same day newspaper in the view and send it to him. I forwarded the request to my future employer asking whether it was the normal verification procedure :-)
Unicorns are easier to find than newspapers. If you threaten to shoot me unless I bring newspaper - I am not even sure where they sell them anymore in my city.
Last time I was in New York City I could not for the life of me find a paper copy of the New York Times to read. Newsstands appear to just be selling candy and drinks.
You can get the New York Times and other newspapers in airports still. I do still buy a newspaper before a flight sometimes, but I actually shouldn't because flights have WiFi now.
Yes - I know you can get them in airports (lounges often give them out for free) - I just thought it a little bizarre that I couldn't find a copy of the New York Times in midtown Manhattan!
Background checks come in different varieties, usually it's criminal and global watchlist checks. Employment and education check is couple $$ extra for the employer, and some employers really don't mind.
It’s also possible to “freeze” your employment history report just like you can freeze your credit report. Which prevents even companies with the wherewithal to do an employment history check from getting that information.
What I find cringeworthy is @Suhail saying they thought he was in the US but actually was in India—outing his company as not checking employment eligibility [0]. If he was actually allowed to work in the US—which doesn't seem to be the case since he hasn't responded to any replies asking about this—then they hired someone who underperformed, or in the worst case violated a company policy they might have that employees cannot have another job. Hardly seems like something worth shouting from rooftops.
The Tweet clearly says they fired in him the first week and confronted him about the lying/scamming. It seems very clear that they figured it out right away and confronted him about it.
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 when we discovered the multiple jobs)
He was a solid middle of the pack contributor on net, but it was clear he was way stronger than his net output just from interactions with him (he had great products ideas, clear technical understanding of many areas, etc).
If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.
in fairness to some interview processes there are ways you could legit pass a valid interview and then short change the job. We do a problem scenario / proposed solution that's shared a few days in advance. Good candidates (and good frauds) can ace this with strong technical skills, relevant experience and maybe an hour or so of prep time. We'd take this as strong signal, because (and I'd hope more companies do this) we're optimizing for talented candidates, not minimizing people who are going to work multiple concurrent jobs.
> but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing.
In my opinion and experience, being a competent developer and being a good interviewer are even less related than being a competent developer and being a good interviewee (and the latter are already very unrelated).
funny thing was he had other places on his linkedin under "active employment" but we never really dug into it (until we learned he was full-time there) because he just seemed like the kind of person who wouldn't keep his LinkedIn up to date.
When we had an OE person they could do good work if you gave them a lot of time, but getting them to communicate and be present with the team was hell. You had to always be tracking them down, getting them to respond, and working any meetings (which we had few of) into some narrow time slot where they were available.
It also drags everyone else down. The team figures out what's going on. They get tired of adjusting their communication around the one person who's always distracted and doing something else.
Basically, it turns into a lot of work for everyone else to get work out of the OE person. Like they can do good work, but they're going to make everyone else work hard to extract it from them because they're busy juggling multiple jobs.
All of the Soham stories I've read today have been the same: Good work when he was working, but he was caught because he wasn't working much.
Yes. He could do solid work when you narrowly define it but he probably sank the productivity and morale of people he was working with.
Individual performance doesn’t matter. Team performance does. All of this work to find 10x engineers is meaningless if they can’t raise the output of the team itself. People can make their teams better (sometimes with elite communication skills instead of technical), but we should be focusing more on building 10x teams, not trying to find unicorns.
People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.
It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.
> People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.
I had the same experience as you with an "overemployed" person: Working with them is really bad for everyone else. They lie, play extreme politics, throw teammates under the bus, make you work harder for everything, and they don't care if it causes you harm because you're just a temporary coworker at one of their "Js"
There's nothing to celebrate about these people. They screw over their teammates far more than the company they work for.
> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs
What blows my mind is people think overemployment of an engineer is bad, but it is more than acceptable for CEO to held top positions in different companies.
CEOs get fired too when a board with sufficient power doesn’t feel like they are performing.
The difference is in most cases the CEO owns the business or a good chunk of it so they’re actually capital owners and employees in name only. If you own the business you make the rules.
I mean, most of my experience with large companies is that things are usually better for my team when the executive team is leaving us alone. A note here and there is nice; but any more focus and it's not great... better for everyone if they're busy doing something else. :P
I think you just described most of the C level executives in the tech industry. They leave companies behind destroyed, with a big pay check. But it’s unethical if simple engineers do it. Sure.
Not sure what your direct experience is, but the difference I've experienced first hand is that C-suite are INTENSELY focused on the single company but only for a relatively short period of time. They're not spread too thin; they're motivated solely by short-term incentives. An OE engineer is both, and we can agree they all suck for people who want to do meaningful work and build an awesome team - but they seem very different to me.
> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.
What about people that put full effort and then some into jobs with long hours and loads of stress just to get hit with a PIP or get caught in the latest round of layoffs?
If that's how companies treat people, what's so wrong with 'overemployed' people having a fallback, especially in today's market?
Most people are not putting full effort into their jobs, which is why we are considered heros.
So you could fight us, but plenty just join us in playing games, lowering expectations, and collecting their check and going home. We are awful colleagues if you have ambition, but if you do not, we get along fine with people.
How often do people put full effort into even one job? I do enough to move my career forward and to keep myself employed. Everything else is just working for free.
This is a really good perspective, and I've seen a similar impact from "under employed" members of my teams. We have group-level product managers who have several scrum team-level PMs under them. The idea is they keep broader alignment and bigger-picture consistency, but when they don't spend time with each of the scrum teams, or miss planning meetings and important discussions the teams pay the price from lack of communication, coordination and a shared understanding.
Why do you need to draw a line? Can there be good cults and bad teams?
Both have implicit contracts, and a contract requires consideration on both sides. The parties define the value of the consideration, so you can have a junior cult member who feels they are getting good value for what they pay, or a SW dev at an insurance company who feels they don't. I also don't see much difference in your ability to affect your situation if you are unhappy with the current state.
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.
Why bother, when you get the paid the same regardless?
I don’t know the guy, but I feel like a lot of people are missing this angle - just because you’re technically capable, doesn’t mean you’re actually motivated or that you actually bother to deliver. You can also be lazy and just collect your check.
This is my experience for the past 10 years I've been working in the industry. As soon as someone finds out I am more capable at something than the rest of the colleagues on the team I get to do all the work in that area yet receive nothing in return. Every time I tried to bring something up as an example of doing something more my achievements were downplayed as part of the regular duties or my mistakes were put on the pedestal instead. There were also calls to do more, even though I already was doing more than the average programmer on the project. Nothing was ever enough.
In my current job I aimed to be painfully average at everything I do and so far I haven't seen any difference. I still get the same reviews I was getting all these years and the salary increases are still as mediocre as the ones I was getting when I was trying my best. My only fear is that this strategy might lead to complete stagnation. I am already bored out of my mind and I would switch jobs in a heartbeat, but I can't currently do that due to variety of reasons.
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.
The VPs, heads of, and C levels of most of the companies I have worked for were also pretending to be working. They knew the company wasn’t profitable, they gave a couple of advices here and there, and then left the company. Big pay checks. Now they are doing the same all over again in other companies.
Tired of considering this “normal” and nobody talking about it. But when one simple engineer does it, well, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, yada yada.
Every manager and employer should skim through that subreddit. When I stumbled onto it I felt like Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense, where the truth was revealed and every flashback moment suddenly made sense and lined up. Until then, things just felt “off” but it was hard to put a finger on what was actually going on.
Anecdotally I'd argue that it's not just "plenty", but the majority of people who only work one single job barely and/or pretend to work. I regularly see Principal+ engineers, VPs and Directors waddling around looking important or just staring at their monitors with a glazed over look.
Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, why not dedicate the remaining 20 hours to another corp, and double your comp? Everyone wins.
HackerNews dudes claiming they do a true minimum 40 hours per week, every week, forever, of heads-down hard-work are deluding themselves. I really don't understand the overemployment hatred this forum has. There are plenty of folks who really do solid work at 2+ jobs, not half-assing and politicking.
Wage theft vastly outstrips other forms of theft[0] and it's considered a complete non priority by law enforcement, politicians, and the media.
These kinds of things just aren't a priority for one reason for another. Let's brainstorm some solutions to wage theft and overemployment.
I suggest a synergistic approach -- fix wage theft and it'll have a knock-on effective with things like overemployment or people pretending to work a single job.
How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.
> 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.
Why.
I have worked in VC-backed startups for over a decade. The individual employee isn't going to change the direction of the company regardless of how hard they work.
The people who make or break the startup are the founders. Even the middle managers do not matter. If the founders / top level leaders have no idea what they are doing and do not want to make money, nothing a single engineer does even matters.
The best thing an engineer can do in that scenario is give advice and do work as prescribed. Trying to save the founders from themselves is a recipe for going crazy and burning out.
For trusting people to fulfil their employment contract?
What is the alternative, micromanage and monitor everyone? I am in the camp I want to trust people, especially highly skilled and highly paid employees.
This makes no sense. The whole thing is idiotic. Seems to be a combination of LARP and some people trying to push a narrative.
If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.
>If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.
You won't earn more. I've considered that at one point and most adverts on freelance sites like Upwork are written by people who are either clueless or downright insane. These people usually want you to create a completely new system from scratch using technologies of their choosing and the offers are like $8-$15 per hour or $800 for work that is supposed to take months to complete. Why would anyone want to agree to do that when apparently getting steady paychecks from multiple companies is an option?
On upwork you are competing with people from third world countries who can offer vastly lower prices.
Also the quality of the work is bottom of the barrel.
What you want to do is look for small to mid sized companies in your area and solve problems for them. You gonna build up your network and reputation.
There is a good reason many people don't go freelance, it is not for everyone. You need some really good social and business skills and it can be stressful. But the money is sure there.
I did two full-time jobs for a month as part of changing jobs fifteen years ago and it’s exceedingly intense but otherwise was fine; eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have. Employers don’t like this because that’s a lot of work they could have persuaded an employee to provide as unpaid overtime labor instead; much this outrage is simple jealousy. If you’re doing the job to the specifications requested at a sufficient level to remain employed, then they have no basis to cry outrage. Employment is just as monogamous as marriages are: sometimes, not always.
24-18 = 6 hours "non-working" time. Eating, washing and shitting is min 1 hour/day.So 5 hours of bed time with around 4.75 hrs of sleep at most, because we don't fall asleep right away.
The math doesn't work long term. It may be kept for 1-2 months even when a person is 21 yrs old, but I doubt it it can be sustained more than that.
It doesn’t necessarily take 18 hours a day to do two full-time jobs for a full workday. Certainly I’ve never spent longer than three weeks doing 16h/day! I don’t advise it.
Work has always been a distraction from my hobbies. _Always_. Sometimes they're related, but often they're not.
Though... Your stance lines up with people who work well into their retirement years while not needing the income? I'd struggle to give two weeks notice if I suddenly had enough money to live on for the rest of my life.
I like work because work provides value for other people. I don't like hobbies because hobbies provide value only to myself, and I am already worth enough as I am. What's there not to get?
Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I was bored as an adult - the times I was bored as a kid, it was because adults were making be somewhere or do something that wasn’t engaging.
I literally have a computer at hand 24/7 now, I’m almost never bored. It’s kinda crazy to think about much of a change that is.
No? If I meant that, I would have said that. My current hobby that benefits others is reverse engineering something. I have no revenue plans or pathway for that effort, it’s been underway for five years, and it’s keeping my need to help occupied as I go through full-time school.
Hiring managers and HR area increasingly only open to unicorn candidates that have the exact amount of experience in the exact tech stack. While a few of those people exist, it's definitely more likely they end up interviewing people that are open to lying. So now your pipeline is filled with 90% liars, some just small white lies and others who have made a resume that has exclusively tailored lies just for your org.
The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.
Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.
I’ll be surprised if it does. Software jobs are slumping for several reasons and the section 174 hack fixes one for a while but causes between one to four other problems depending on where you live.
Odds are this is a dev shop with more than one person doing at least some things. It would explain how “he” was able to get so many jobs and maintain appearances. And a lot of startups don’t have the best screening processes to begin with (have a beer with a founder, check out their source code, you’re hired!). This is exactly the place where the structure and processes of larger companies can be a benefit. And even then, people work multiple jobs and get away with it. It’s become popular post COVID.
Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.
Think so too. Also because different companies have different "reviews" of his work. Some saying he was only good at interviews, others saying the quality of work was good. Must have been diffferent people working.
US companies are afraid of litigations or European labour laws (irrelevant if you hire a contractor) but will not hesitate to hire questionable people from 3rd world countries for about the same pay like they would europeans.
ding ding ding. both soham + recruiter implied he basically just codes day and night. our founder (yc) was drooling! there's a very specific type of company + founder that falls for this stuff. no surprise he targeted ai startups.
IQ tests are also distinct skills but IQ scores are the most quantifiable and studied numbers in all of psychology and correlate with all kinds of things like job performance.
I think the purpose of the interview is the same thing. Even though there's no strong evidence for a correlation it's reasonable to believe intuitively that there is.
I suspect (and have seen some evidence) that the interviews he aced were algo-based. Doing well in these is very repeatable, with low additional effort. Behavioural are much harder to do at scale.
A handful of comments already alluded to it, but maybe YC startups aren’t as smart as they think they are when they are looking for their founding engineers. Especially when it’s just the two founders looking for find their early engineers and the one holding the mba is the one leading/hiring. East to dupe these folks early on?
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 usually less structured (no silly ex-faang engineers/managers playing god). They usually pay less, ofc, hence the need to have a couple of jobs.
At least in western europe, it’s very hard to land a 130K job, but two 65K jobs? Rather fine.
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, so that's an avenue you could try out.
Here in Germany you are currently only allowed to work 48hours per week. Also there are strict laws for companies to actually track work time.
So it is absolutely impossible for someone here to have two full time jobs without committing working time fraud.
But even if you could, it would make literally no sense two have jobs as you earn vastly more with freelancing anyway. You would scam yourself.
The most optimal move is to have one regular job so you get health care and social security and do freelancing on the side. If you work contract allows that, of course.
Really? Like, in Germany it's illegal for someone to have a full-time job doing software and then a side business making soap and selling it at a farmer's market on the weekend?
No, that case would be fine if the side business would be being self-employed. No one cares how many hours you work if you are self-employed. (Mostly, I am simplifying here)
What is an issue is working employed for two jobs and going over the 48 hour limits.
Working that much is very unhealthy so the state needs to protect people from being exploited. People should be able to live from working full time. Having to work multiple jobs and to destroy your own health is morally abhorrent.
Under German law being employed by a company and being self-employed are legally very distinct things. If you are employed you get protection from being fired, you have to have health care, pay into the retirement fond and so on.
If you are self-employed you are on your own. You can decide if you use public or private health care, you need to figure out how to save up for retirement yourself and so own. You get more freedom but less protection. That is because the law realizes that working people need protection from exploitation but also wants to give freedom to those that want to try their own business.
> Working that much is very unhealthy so the state needs to protect people from being exploited.
I get that the state needs to protect people from being exploited but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about it.
It seems to me that it would be better if the state had policies in place to ensure that one full-time job (or less even) provided sufficient income to enable a person to live self-sufficiently and raise a family.
Working a full-time job and raising a family is often a more stressful thing than a single person working a job that requires over-time. I don't see why the state should regulate how someone without kids spends their free time if that person wants to work.
Some people are just naturally inclined to be active, whether it's some combination of work, family, volunteering, and sports activities while others are not. I have a friend who is constantly working and constantly going to concerts and playing on several sports teams. His life seems stressful to me and far beyond how I want to spend my life but he enjoys it.
The state shouldn't restrict people from choosing how to spend their time, but instead should strive to create a society where people aren't forced to spend too much of their time working to meet their basic needs, with the ultimate goal of gradually reducing the time needed to do so over time.
> I don't see why the state should regulate how someone without kids spends their free time if that person wants to work.
So single people that can work 60 hours a day would get all the careers options while the person raising children is left in the dust? Does not sound fair.
> Some people are just naturally inclined to be active, whether it's some combination of work, family, volunteering, and sports activities while others are not.
That sounds like a healthy mix of activities. On the other hand working 60 hours a week is not.
> The state shouldn't restrict people from choosing how to spend their time,
It does not. You can create your own business and work yourself to death if you wish to. Again, the protection is for those that are employed by others.
Or in other words: You are allowed to hurt your own health as an entrepreneur but you are not allowed to employ people in such a way that it excessively hurts their health, even if they "consent" to it. Thing is, they can't consent because there is a power imbalance. Even if you make laws that people working less hours should not be discriminated, you can't really stop it.
Not to mention someone who is a workaholic needs psychological help not the "freedom" to work more.
> but instead should strive to create a society where people aren't forced to spend too much of their time working to meet their basic needs, with the ultimate goal of gradually reducing the time needed to do so over time.
That is just not how capitalism works. Yes, you can fight for wage increases. You can fight for limits of working hours. But those gains will have to be paid in blood.
You idea would only work under socialism which had the Subbotnik which was volunteer unpaid labor on the weekends for the betterment of society.
I understand the concern about exploitation, but there’s a fine line between protection and paternalism. Just because some people overwork themselves doesn’t mean everyone else should be forbidden from choosing to work more and it isn't obvious that working 60 hours a week hurts your health.
Raising kids is but one kind of life stressor and it's not the state’s job to "equalize" life paths by punishing those who don’t have children or want to pursue different goals. Instead, the state should ensure a strong safety net so people are free to find their own balance.
Some pursuits genuinely take a monk-like dedication to see breakthroughs and we shouldn't hobble ambitious people who want to undertake them in the interest of fairness. You're describing a world where someone can't become a viruouso cellist, pioneer a life saving neurosurgery technique or revolutionize computer architecture because someone else decides to have kids. That doesn't sit right with me -- it's a little too Harrison Bergeron.
People might want to throw themselves into intense work for a decade before changing direction and focusing on raising a family or giving back to their community. Or maybe they want to do that the other way, start a family first and then once their kids are adults they want to pursue dreams that they spent decades dreaming of. Flexibility and dynamism in life roles is part of a healthy society.
The role of the state should be to ensure that no one has to 60 hours a week to survive and to ensure that everyone has real opportunities to live their best life that they choose -- not to make that choice for them.
> doesn’t mean everyone else should be forbidden from choosing to work more
No one is forbidden to work more. You seem to miss that those laws apply to wage labor. You keep bringing up all kinds of work that have nothing to do with this.
> You're describing a world
I am describing the status quo in Germany and many other developed countries. The US are the outlier.
> someone can't become a viruouso cellist
No one is telling you how much or little you are allowed to practice an instrument. You can practice 24/7 in as far as the German state is allowed. Not to mention musicians that are self-employed anyway.
Same with the other points. You can dedicate all you waking time into practicing to solve leet code questions. You can focus everything on your research.
You can work on any hobby you have as much as little as you want. You do do as much research as you want. You can work on your own business as much as you want.
The ONLY, the ONLY thing you can't do is employ someone to work more than 48 hours per week. And reverse be employed on a job that requires you to work for more than 48 hours.
I think that is pretty reasonable.
> it's not the state’s job to "equalize" life paths by punishing those who don’t have children or want to pursue different goals.
Children used to have the freedom to work themselves to early death in mines and factories. It got so bad that it threatened the very foundation of society. So after that yeah people figured the state absolutely should protect children and families.
And again, this has nothing to do with wanting to equalize everyone. There are many areas where exceptional people can go.
A world where people are required to work on improving their skill set for free on their own time is not better than a world where they can receive financial compensation for doing so. Many places allow this and mandate overtime payment for doing so. If someone wants to pay me 1.5x or 2.0x as much for time spent on a task over 40 hours a week that seems like a very appealing prospect to me, especially if it was a task that I was otherwise going to spend my time doing for free.
I think that you're missing the broader point that I'm trying to make here which is this: Why should the state mandate a cap on voluntary employment, rather than focus on ensuring that no one needs to work that much to survive? A system that protects workers from coercion is great. But a system that also prohibits voluntary overcommitment, even when it's for personal growth, artistic mastery, or short-term goals, feels overly paternalistic and your example regarding child labour laws exemplifies that paternalism.
I feel like you're defending the system in Germany not because it's a better system as measured by some objective criteria but because it's the system that you identify with. Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion that a system where people are not allowed to pay other people for more than 48 hours of their time in a week a better system that leads to better outcomes than one where people are free to exchange their time in exchange for a wage with mandatory overtime?
> I feel like you're defending the system in Germany not because it's a better system as measured by some objective criteria but because it's the system that you identify with. Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion
This thread started by parent telling you how it is in Germany. Meanwhile, you have provided zero data or objective criteria yourself...
> If someone wants to pay me 1.5x or 2.0x as much for time spent on a task over 40 hours a week that seems like a very appealing prospect to me, especially if it was a task that I was otherwise going to spend my time doing for free.
Again, overtime is perfectly legal, we were just talking about the average working time per week.
> Why should the state mandate a cap on voluntary employment, rather than focus on ensuring that no one needs to work that much to survive?
Because the first one is the easiest way to ensure the later one. You are missing the power dynamic between employer and employee. That is they main point. It is just not possible for the extra work to be truly voluntarily.
It is the same principle why a boss having sex with their assistant is deeply unethical. Because the power dynamic. Even if we assistant is attracted to them. They know refusing could have consequences for their career.
Plus, that unicorn worker that wants to work more than 48 hours to make someone else rich and is otherwise a healthy, non workaholic individual, does not even exist. If someone is that driven they can just go freelancing and earn even more money.
You idea is solid in a vacuum but just doesn't work with the real power dynamics under capitalism.
> Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion that a system where people are not allowed to pay other people for more than 48 hours of their time in a week a better system that leads to better outcomes than one where people are free to exchange their time in exchange for a wage with mandatory overtime?
I mean the US has one of the worst work-life balances of any developed country, so yeah. Meanwhile Germany is pretty good in that regard. Again, most developed countries limit work time somehow.
Yes! It basically means you go full on freelance or just stay put with whatever job you have. I wanted to try freelancing before I quite my full time job but it's not that easy legally.
I am a bit confused why you think it is not easy. In fact you have the right to reduce your hours from full time to part time if your company employs more than 15 people. So you can easily make time for a freelancing job on the side.
Also you don't really need to track your hours when freelancing other than maybe for billing purposes so you really don't need to worry about hours anyway. Generally you are considered part-time self-employed when doing less than 18 hours per week.
Earning a bit on the side is really not an issue in Germany. In fact the combination of having a part time employed job and then doing freelancing is very popular.
What doesn't work is being full time employed at two companies but that would make no sense even if you could as you would earn much less and pay insane taxes.
> In fact you have the right to reduce your hours from full time to part time if your company employs more than 15 people.
Having the right and your employer agreeing to it isn't the same. Do you want people to go to the court if the employer denies it with the risk of losing the job?
>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.
It’s not that I may do it for fun precisely. I want to pay off my house, but I don’t see myself working for the next 30 years earning as much as I have been earning in the last 3 years. Economy is going bad, countries are in war, and everything is just getting harder… if I can double my income (and hence reduce by half the time I’m exposed as a worker to this society) then I’ll do it. Juggling between two jobs doesn’t sound that bad anymore.
You the phrase about how when something becomes a metric it ceases to be a useful measure because everyone starts gaming it?
The same goes for hiring tricks. When some hiring signal becomes a trick that gets passed around by influencers, it ceases to become a useful hiring signal because everyone is gaming it.
If this guy started advertising his process, everyone would start doing his process and it would stop working.
It also doesn't matter if his tricks stop being effective if he can still sell them effectively. He doesn't care about integrity, clearly, so that wouldn't be a problem for him.
Not true or else leetcode would be gone. They made a lot of money off the old paradigm and somebody will certainly take advantage of whatever comes next
Be competent and able to prove it. Work with in-demand tools - for me that's .NET, React, Azure, SQL dbs etc. For others it may be go, python, java, AWS, GCP whatever is in demand near you. Probably not Rust, C or C++ etc - I'm sure there's demand for that too but at least near me they're a lot rarer.
Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.
Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.
If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.
Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.
There are a few comments from the companies that hired him in the og twitter thread [0]. Sounds like he was actually really good at interviews. Kinda shows how broken the hiring system is if you can smash an interview but fail catastrophically at the job.
You think? I'm extending the term to actually getting a job in "traditional" organizations. You already have to optimize for keywords etc, don't you? It's not human interaction but a "process".
> he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
But they got an "AI" engineer didn't they? Or no one in management could define what an "AI" engineer is?
Tbh I'd give the guy a high paying job, but in marketing.
I wonder if he's spending all the time optimizing for interviews & interviewing than actually working. I guess that's what you get if you make the interview process so terrible that only a full-time interviewer (as opposed to real employee) can pass it.
I would imagine that a lot of the job background check processes can be somewhat fuzzy - it's too much time and too unreliable to try asking actual startups if someone is employed there currently, particularly outside of the US, and it wouldn't even really tell you what you wanted to know if someone is saying they'll leave their current job for you.
(Hell, every so often various companies randomly decide that I and someone with almost the same full name as I are the same person, even without that person ever having had an account with the company, and then it's a pain to straighten it out because they all claim they have no insight into where those black box systems pull this information...yes, I'm really quite sure that I did not have a lease on this kind of car before I was born.)
Doubly so, I imagine, if you're not in the US, depending on whether you're an actual FTE or a contractor or what.
I find it hard to be sympathetic to the companies though, really - given how quickly the organizations that love to use family metaphors and imagery to describe their culture will drop people if it's inconvenient for the company, I don't think they get to cry foul on someone thinking they're entitled to the work as promised and nothing else.
The date on that post says a lot more about the state of hiring in ‘21-22 than overemployment (though 10 is a ridiculous amount). Everyone was over-hiring, ZIRP, etc. Then the music stopped in ‘23 and almost everyone was laid off.
I don’t know him, but I did once have a staff member who was kind of the same. Nothing ever got delivered, their dad, mum, aunty, grandmother was always in hospital. They never came into the office. They always had their camera off. When they did do something, it was brilliant but they only produced stuff when questions were being asked. Other staff would cover for him as sort of an unspoken rule.
He wasn't going for that, otherwise he would be more specific.
This looks like some sort of money sink he's ashamed to admit having. Might be gambling, might be porn. Whatever it is, it's not something he'll garner any compassion for.
He agreed to a YouTube interview with an established channel.
As per his cold emails and interview patter, it is my opinion that he will have considered defence and mitigations arguments to present in the interview.
That's a hell of a gambling addiction when he's making about 10 times what I am. You'd think you'd stop if you were just flushing that money down the toilet and not winning anything from the gambling
Well if you are winning money, you need to keep going as to not waste your lucky streak. If you are losing, you need to double down to win back what you lost. You need to keep going, as long as you do, the loses are not real, you can still turn it around. You need to play one more game. One more. You don't want to face she consequences of your action, you are in too deep. Your life will be ruined. There is no escape. It is to late to stop anyway, might as well keep playing.
Many people don't understand how serious gambling addictions is. It destroys families. I can be as bad as any drug related addiction if not worse.
Though that was just one guess. There are many money sinks. Porn, gacha games and so on.
About twenty years ago there was a story in Melbourne, of a young foreign student at the casino.
He withdrew $1,000 from the ATM from his home back in Asia. Was duly given the cash. He noticed though, that looking at online banking, his balance hadn't changed. Odd, but maybe it was a vagary of international transactions (and again, 20+ years ago).
Nope. So he took out another $1,000. And another. Every time, got the money, no transaction posted.
Not just one ATM, any.
Over the course of 2 years when it all came out, he had gotten $2M+ from this.
Know how he got caught? He took some of that money gambling. And sat at a table all night, constantly replenishing his stash. That tipped off the casino that something was odd, because they had loaded the ATM with $250K, which usually lasted ~48h, but he emptied out in a few. "Didn't we fill this this afternoon?".
Once they got the financial institutions it was also fairly quickly revealed.
And in court, the local banks admitted that there had been nothing flagged in their system, and presumably it would have kept working until (at least) his card expired.
There you have a literal money printing machine, and "No, let's see what I can win gambling". I suppose here's other factors like "Maybe it's easier to launder a big winning" but nonetheless, it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling.
> it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling
Presumably he expected the jig to go up eventually and be asked to return the money; if his gambling was successful he could've returned the money and avoid any trouble, essentially having made his winnings on credit.
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?
Honestly feels like the whole Soham Parekh thing on Twitter is one giant joke with the one sincere / honest remark being the original from @Suhail.
Like, I can't wrap my head around this many people having some kind of experience with a single guy who's claim to be fame is basically gaming the interview process at an incredible amount of Y Combinator startups.
Yeah, I'm surprised someone who's been working at over 50 companies in only 3 years wasn't caught sooner. Some of the stories are wild enough that they had to have been shared with others at the time.
Founders don't like to go around advertising that they got tricked by a scammer. They're trying to impress everyone and raise money. Telling the whole world that you got scammed is not a good look.
Years ago I was hired as an Engineering Manager at a small company, within about the first month on the job I had to have the awkward conversation about firing two of the employees on my team.
See it turned out that the boss worked remote 4-1/2 days of the week, and the employees were in office.
One would show up at 10, take 2 hour lunch around 11.30 and leave around 2.30. He did not work remote. This employee was as always behind on his work.
Second wasn’t even a programmer. He just lied on his resume and got the job over beers and a handshake. He was a graphics designer, he played off a few WordPress template installs as his portfolio.
To keep a story short, the owner spent months doing everything but firing the two employees, demanding I try to teach the designer some computer science and ignored the other scammer. He refused to believe he paid these men 6-figures for years on end. That I must be coming in here to lie and wreck his company, that I left my cushy high-frequency trading job to ruin his startup.
When I asked the sole good engineer on the team what in the hell was going on at this company she simply told me “Oh, the old manager just did all the work for the other two guys since he was their buddy and hired them originally.”
It doesn't have to be the whole world, just their inner circle. If people are that reluctant to admit fault (50 times!), then that's a dismal statement on how often we see truth in society overall.
Yes. He'd commit code once a week or so, and then make excuses on why he couldn't do more. They're fire him after a couple months, and by then, he'd have gotten the money.
My understanding from what I saw on twitter about this yesterday was that a number of the companies that did hire him ended up firing him very quickly soon after, I think
Interviewing is a skill. I think that he got really good at it, both in tailor his CV as well as the process itself. It probably worked on the process and make adjustments. Based on the what I’ve read, it seems that he was interviewing all the time.
So, IMHO, he focused in the interview process over everything else, including understanding and exploiting the blind spots. He iterated and refined it, until, he became a master of it.
He really seemed to be not great at the work itself, though. He was being fired after a couple of days, which I don’t think is common. You really have to do it very badly to be fired so quick after being hired.
This is what happens at top consulting firms. Top 5% interview skills, especially as smoothing your way through a case study. But when they actually come consult for your business, it’s just not what you pay for given what you’ve been led to believe with those case studies.
How come all the companies that hired him are "X but with AI"? Any several state he "aced" their algo-focused interviews. That's like winning a long drive contest; it doesn't mean you're good at golf.
the issue is hiring processes do not verify what is on resume. ppl lie about even their education/degrees and what school they went talk less the company they worked at. Most people know companies do not verify any of those and background checks are usually about real name and criminal records only; they do not check employment history and education history.
Hint, start a company that does this and become the next unicorn overnight and help companies verify these right before offer stage. Good luck!!!
It's because in the leftist bay area tech scene, of which ycombinator is the absolute epicenter, no one does bias training. Among leftists, indians are the "model minority" and everyone is looking for an indian golden boy. You have no idea you are even doing it because you have implicit bias you are always crowing about. India is one of the poorest nations on earth and has many smart people, but there is an infatuation among the monied west coast left.
In a way the leftist tech scene has adopted eastern mysticism and shows how far california has moved from westernism. Hindu and Buddhism are religions that worship living humans and believe in divine incarnation. A young person might be a llama in hinduism or a tulku in buddhism. It's not to say that these tech startups are worshiping their newly discovered india programmer, but it is the culture that does not fall far from the tree.
for companies who hired him and let him go, you should be reviewing your interview system.
it looks like we are going back to old argument "coders who are good at interviews (most likely leetcode), but terrible at delivering actual work."
the issue is hiring processes do not verify what is on resume. ppl lie about even their education/degrees and what school they went talk less the company they worked at. Most people know companies do not verify any of those and background checks are usually about real name and criminal records only; they do not check employment history and education history.
Hint, start a company that does this and become the next unicorn overnight and help companies verify these right before offer stage. Good luck!!!
What is the difference between this and leadership being in the committees, boards and executive seats of multiple companies?
Why is it the social expectation that an IC must devote 100% of their time and energy to the operations of a single company, when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?
IME, employees are on committees and boards (though not public company boards all that often) all the time. The issue here taking multiple full time positions. A CEO being the CEO of multiple companies at once is not common, and when it does happen it tends to draw a lot of scrutiny. CEO is considered a full time job, showing up to a board meeting every quarter is not.
The second part of this is disclosure, which was not done in this case.
"at the head" of large - especially publicly traded - companies is not the same as trying to run all aspects of the day-to-day. It also rarely (ever?) happens when they don't have a big ownership stake, or are there primarily as a figurehead.
We can debate if the executive timeline is too short and that's what destroys companies, but I don't see how this is the same as an over-employed engineer who's spread too thin.
Incidentally, why aren't there more part time positions?
Probably because said leadership would then be unable to keep their employees in meetings since they're supposed to do some actual work once in a while.
At the C-suite level, I'm noticing more "fractional" positions, which — as far as I can tell — is a fancier way of saying part time. (This may be the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon at work, though.)
> Incidentally, why aren't there more part time positions?
It is obviously easier to manage a small group of people who work full-time than a larger group of people who work part-time. So, if there does not exist a strong wish for part-time positions from the employees, few will be created.
Also, a lot of employees are there "for the money". So getting paid much worse for a part-time position is considered to be the worse deal by many employees.
because the overhead of a PT or fractional employee is just about as much as a FT one, and why should I give you 100% attention when you only want to give me 50%?
There aren’t formal part time positions but there’s a lot of jobs that only occupy half your full time and don’t ask questions when you disappear for a few hours
The difference is pretty explicit in the terms and conditions? By the way, there are also leadership positions with similar limitations on your ability to take outside roles.
>What is the difference between this and leadership being in the committees
That this involved lying to your employers. There is no social expectation that you only work one job, plenty of people work multiple jobs, but there is a social expectation that you do what you said you'd do, and it turns out you have a bit of a mathematical problem if you try to work 4 eight hour jobs in a 24 hour day.
Which is, as per the article, how he was caught. Turns out if you call in sick at one place and then push code to github for your other jobs most employers aren't paying you for that.
Please. Employers are going after the your last drop of blood. The only reason that’s socially accepted is because they have the power to do so, and because it has been like that since ever. You make one mistake and you’re fired (sometimes even you’re fired randomly); the company is not earning as much as last year? Layoffs! AI can do part of your job? Layoffs!
It’s silly and servant-like to think you are in an equal-to-equal position when dealing with a company and that you cannot dedicate your time to other endeavors just because they wrote that in a paper. If it turns out that they don’t like how you perform while doing multiple jobs, they will fire you, just like they will fire you even if you work just for them.
Employment contract is a contract and usually it's fixed hours per workday for a salary. So basically you as employee swap X hours per Y amount of money.
If one of the parties is in breach of that contract it's normal it to be dissolved. If you don't want to work, you don't need to sign that contract.
The really moral part of free market economy is that both parties are voluntary entering a contract. You as a person sell your skilled time, the company buys your skilled time. If you have super unique skills, like Andrej Karpathy you sell something on the market that is very valuable and you have the upper hand.
If you know "Microsoft Excel" I'd bet there are many people (or AI agents) that will do the same and what you're selling can be bought in many places (and time zones).
Basic microeconomics... In a free market you need to do something for the others to have something for you. And if it's not useful, they won't pay you for that.
Salaried positions are explicitly not selling time. Whether I work 2 or 12 hours the compensation is the same. The only reason these contracts make sense is the unstated agreement that my employer won’t abuse the contractual power they theoretically have. And what’s the alternative? Signing bad contracts and leaving when things go to shit is probably 10x better for my career than pretending that I have agency in contract negotiations
All the jobs I had in was contractually required to work from X to Y at a place Z. So my experience is that is indeed a selling skilled time.
The ones you describe where there is a contract for output, usually with external contractors not full-time employees.
And you indeed have agency, especially if you provide something hard to find or you're the sole provider for this company of that service and the switching cost is high. Basic microeconomics...
I'm in an equal to equal position to not sign any contract I don't like. What is it with this whiny attitude in this industry? We're talking specifically about software engineers. The guy worked four six figure jobs raking in 40 grand a month and didn't show up to work. Can we stop pretending we're oppressed workers because we have to show up from 9-5, Jesus.
In my experience I have no leverage and the contract is too vague to mean anything. The contract I signed says my job conditions and work hours are subject to change at any time. I understand I took a risk, but things were fine for years before they wanted me to start being available 24/7 or work late into the night. In environments like this the only sane thing to do is reluctantly accept the terms of the contract and push as many boundaries as I can.
Just because the employer pays me and I signed a contract doesn’t mean I can’t complain or push back. Do you think I should also dance like a Walmart employee in the morning if my employer tells me to? The contract I signed says yes but in reality it doesn’t matter
You've answer your own question. If you are hired to work full-time you are expected to do that (as per your contract). If you are on a board or committee the expectation is a number of hours per month.
But fulltime is a contract thing (at least here) and defined by 40 hrs a week. In my country 32-36 in contracts is also called fulltime. So after those hours, I did my fulltime and now you do not own me until the next 40 hours. Unless working for competitors currently here you cannot make valid contracts to prevent it either.
However, if you are in the EU, then all your employers are jointly responsible for ensuring that your collective working hours don't breach the Working Time Directive, which means 48 hours as the maximum average working week, calculated over a 4-month period, across all employers (excluding certain statutory roles like seamen, law enforcement, and military).
There are contractual terms, including things that are likely to be conflict of interests or impact performance. And depending on jurisdiction there are also laws on working hours: 48 hours max. per week on average in the UK and EU across all jobs (it is possible to opt out) and with minimum rest times. Because employers can be held liable, if they find out they won't let you.
The comment I was replying to does not make sense.
> when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?
This is extremely rare; generally a CxO is a full-time job. Elon Musk is a notable exception, and, ah, it doesn't seem to be going _great_. Being a _board_ member isn't usually a significant time commitment.
when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview
It is kind of tiring for me to read people equating "Elon Musk" with "all those rich guys being CEOs".
When you really are a business owner OFTEN you have to devote 120% of your time and energy for running the company and single one.
People you see on TV flying private jets to expensive holiday destinations are not your average business owners. Elon and the likes are the exception not the norm.
Rather, since by basic economy markets are controlled by incentives:
He is the kind of person that companies actually want. (Otherwise these companies would have set up a different interviewing process (i.e. different incentives)).
The technologies aren't that groundbreaking after all. Resources on both side of supply and demand remain the same. There was no paradigm shit, no miraculous influx of extraordinary candidates. It's the illusion of choice creating the standoff. You have to lie and cheat to be considered a choice.
This shouldn't come as a revelation, but it's risky to employ people of low character. There's the risk of theft, lawsuits, etc – not to mention, nobody needs the frustration of dealing with lies and flakiness.
1) from the employer side, this runs afoul of all MBA theory and practice, so he could have been more profits. Almost by definition, this means you're not getting the maximum out of the guy. Oh and there's jealousy of course.
2) from employee's side, this runs afoul of union thinking. Those jobs could have employed 5 people, maybe more. Oh and there's jealousy of course.
I saw several anecdotes that were: “when he did the job, it was great, but he rarely did the job because there was always someone sick, meeting with a lawyer, or any excuse to not deliver”.
So I think that finding about multiple employment is actually about realizing he was lying the whole time with the excuses.
We had a guy like that... the thing is you cannot really pass any responsibility on him because he will eventually be distracted with other stuff. You will never know when you have him 100%. You don't want to keep checking on your employees week by week day by day, if they deliver.
You need some degree of trust in your employees (you cannot "verify" all the time), and you cannot trust some guy you KNOW is cheating on you.
Lots of YC companies copy each other process and selection criteria. Basically- they all have the same blind spots and look for the same type of engineer.
So, super easy to scam all of them with the same skillset and mannerism.
This guy, and guys like him, are the reason why it's such a pain to do legit business in the modern world.
Try getting a code signing certificate, opening a bank account for a new business or listing an app on the App Store. You'll quickly see the effects of this kind of behavior.
This guy should be absolutely ostracized.
[Edit: not to mention the countless brilliant Indian software devs for whom he just directly put Silicon Valley out of reach.]
Ostracized? I don’t know. If the companies he works for are happy enough with his output, then what’s wrong? What’s silly is that we have to work for 40 years to afford a living place that can hardly accommodate you and your family. What’s silly is that you have executives earning 5 times what you earn jumping from company to company and doing nothing but maximizing their own profits. So, yeah, fuck companies. He guy is playing the game the best he can, and if any company doesn’t like his output they can just fire him.
Relevant people can share it privately and put out a public warning about obviously noticeable behavioral patterns.
Couple issues here:
1) Sharing it wide open on the Web for the whole world to see and everyone to poke fun of is a massive intrusion.
2) It's also a gateway to bunch of nonsense and false information all over the Internet. Half the stuff I see about this person under allegations, I just don't trust. Not to mention all of a sudden there are tens of impersonators.
3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
All this is happening too close to people openly talking about what AI researchers are being traded on every social media platform. Idk if any of these people ever wanted to be so famous.
> 1) Sharing it wide open on the Web for the whole world to see and everyone to poke fun of is a massive intrusion.
If this person had done a single violation I'd agree. He's a serial manipulator, though, and he's been scamming people throughout the startup community. Once your behavior starts becoming a problem for a community, you shouldn't expect that community to also protect your identity.
The person was targeting a startup community (YC) and had learned how to game their system. The person posting the info didn't even post it immediately. They posted it a year later after hearing multiple stories of the person continuing to do it.
> 3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
There's a photo of him right in the thread specifically so people can determine if they're talking about the same person. He was also highlighted on a Meta open source developer blog a few years ago.
We hired Soham.
I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.
Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good. He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.
> The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.
I worked with an overemployed person (not Soham). It was exactly like this.
Started out great. They could do good work when they knew they were in focus. Then they started pushing deliverables out farther and farther until it was obvious they weren't trying. Meetings were always getting rescheduled with an array of excuses. Lots of sad stories about family members having tragedies over and over again.
It wears everyone down. Team mates figure it out first. Management loses patience.
Worst part is that one person exhausts the entire department's trust. Remote work gets scrutinized more. Remote employees are tracked more closely. It does a lot of damage to remote work.
> Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good.
I doubt it's a dev shop because the dev shops use rotating stand-ins to collect the paychecks, not the same identity at every job. This guy wanted paychecks sent directly to him.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
> He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.
Wild to be cutting work trial days in half to do other jobs. Although I think he was also testing companies to see who was lenient enough to let him get away with all of this.
> However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.
What a silly waste of his time and reputation (in addition to other people's).
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?
> 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 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).
I think this is a US specific thing.
I work as a contractors with all my clients (who know of each others) and they all pay significantly more per hour compared to an employee. As an employee I could expect to make 1/4 of what I actually make.
The only exception in this arrangement was when I worked with an US company, they wanted to hire me as an employee and paid 1k per month to some company in my country just to hire me. An insane waste of money, not to mention taxes on my side.
I seriously doubt this. What's your rate and average post-tax take-home over the past few years?
Yes: US salary costs include having to pay healthcare fees (it’s not universal here), so work contracted prices are generally discounted by that amount relative to salaries.
US tech salaries are so much higher [at tech companies] that it closes much of the gap on how much more you could earn in a consulting arrangement.
In the US it's not uncommon to have a $200k base. Not even taking into account stock compensation and benefits, you'd need to command about $400/hr contracting to fit your 4x figure. Does that sound comparable to your setup?
I don't know about the person you're asking, but I have known many people (both programmers and consultants in other areas like marketing, game design, etc.) who billed at more than that hourly rate, here in Europe (where salaries don't commonly go above $200k).
> 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 job.
So both involved sides get a part of the pie that is negotiated about, and has to compromise on another aspect.
You say this like you can just talk with the VP and CFO and have a nuts and bolts conversation about big systems things as an pre-hire IC. You can't negotiate with even medium-sized companies at that level. They have a fixed idea of what the 'role' looks like, and almost always it's full-time, long-term. You can negotiate maybe 10-25% salary increase, but that's it. Good luck even getting more PTO (the "standard" amount is always "generous" and if you got more it would complicate "team dynamics").
I wanted to explain from a purely economic perspective why if you want a consulting role instead of a full-time job, you will likely be paid much less.
Consulting often pays way more than salaries every do.
In the same way that driving Uber pays more than driving for a taxi company: Not as much when you factor in your own expenses (taxes, insurance, etc) and non-billable work.
Uber doesn't pay more than a job as a taxi driver as far as I know (take home).
The take home pay after carrying more expenses probably makes it worse.
Uber sells demand for transport. They don't own the transport and the burden of owning, and maintaining the transport is pushed on to freelancers, who have less certainty of income than they would as employees might.
Theres been lots written about the insecurity to employment that is created by more things offering gig jobs on one hand but not always ending up also offering part time or full time positions.
From the customers side, apps like Uber provide a sense of certainty (visual map) that existing industries haven't been willing to invest the same kind of capital into and those apps as a result are not comparable or inviting.
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.
Contractors like CEOs send clear signals they refuse self exploitation and are willing to exploit others .
> 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?
I've worked with several small contracting businesses, including some that came highly recommended.
They were all very inefficient relative to having someone in-house. They also came with the problem that institutional knowledge was non-existent because they had a rotating crew of people working for you.
Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge. The companies he applied for specifically did not want to contract the work out to a body shop.
That's what happens when you hire bad contractors. There are so many bad contractors and selection bar for contractors is much lower compared to employees.
If you keep your standards high when hiring contractors you'll get the same level of quality you have with employees. Contractor agencies are also pretty happy to have long lasting clients (I have been with my current clients respectively for: 4 years, 3 years, 1 years and 1 month).
You just described why consulting makes big bucks
> Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge.
Then make it part of the contracting deal that the contractors have to give the in-house people sufficient training about the code/project that they worked on.
Or work at Meta or Microsoft and make $600k-950k and become a sr production engineer or principal engineer quickly.
Being disloyal and breaking trust and reputation for temporary gain is crazy.
>Or work at Meta or Microsoft and make $600k-950k
Getting that kind of pay at Meta at least, is less skill and more politics. If he had the soft skills to get that job he would be probably doing that.
> I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
It is hilarious that companies that hired a guy who was scamming them are also convinced they are great at assessing the skill level of devs.
Is it so hard to believe that someone can be a great candidate in an interview when you're getting 100% of their attention and then be horrible at their job when you're getting 20% of it because they're juggling 5 jobs?
he had no proof he can code, no projects, no github, only hired because he gave them a lowball offer, it was lowball because he was scamming
The OP said he blew interviews out of the water. Presumably they mean technical interviews, that's how he proved he can code. By writing code.
Lots of devs don't have personal projects. I love programming but after spending the whole day programming I don't particularly want to go home and continue programming.
you wouldn't and he wouldn't get past me, lots of devs don't have personal projects? That is a good filter, give me the ones with higher agency that do. Maybe my standards are too high. I usually contribute the most lines at work, and have personal projects that helped get me the job in the first place.
With agentic coding on the rise, it's easier to make a side project after a year of nights and weekends.
Nobody wants to go home and make a project that proves to future employers you can do the job, everybody wants to get paid though.
I am like you, I'm someone that can happily code for eight straight hours on task and then happily jump to a side project afterwards in a totally different language / domain. Take it for the single point of data that it is, but: I have met equally as many high performers who do NOT code at home as I have mediocre ones that did. And the number of programmers who code solely on the job is far, far more common than those who take their work home with them. Statistically speaking, at least in my personal experience, that makes the at-home coder notably worse on average. As someone that used to think like you, I think the only thing you're really doing is the boys-club-esque equivalent of what the old Ivy League managers used to do (Oh, he's from MIT! That's perfect, we only hire MIT grads here). You're hiring what you know because you understand people with that background more.
You might find on the opposite end of the spectrum that someone with a perfectly equal skillset is laughing at the idea of taking on personal projects when he can just optimize for getting hired somewhere where they prioritize paying you to learn on the job.
Where did you hear this? People on X said the exact opposite.
Technical interviews and answering system design questions do not prove you can code. This is for a founding engineer position. When I started in the industry in 2014, I had to explain the architecture decisions of my side projects. Now people parrot information off the web and call it proof of code.
Being a good developer and being a scammer are completely uncorrelated variables.
Someone can be a good developer and also be a scammer. I don't understand why you think this is hilarious or weird.
It's hilarious because companies use such scammable ways to define who is "top 0.1%"
Also there's a ton amazing engs out there who want and need work but the companies all only want that one "perfect" guy (or gal), as if such a thing exists
I've seen a lot more employed shitty devs than I've seen unemployed amazing devs. In fact I don't know a single competent developer who has trouble getting work.
This is in Norway, maybe it's different elsewhere.
My observation of the situation in Germany is different: I know quite some quite skilled developers who have/had quite some trouble getting jobs.
The other hand, the bad developers (impostors) who easily found jobs were typically sycophants. On the other hand, many highly skilled developers were rather more stubborn (they can't stand bullshit), very honest, and not "corporate politicians".
There’s low correlation between success and ability once you hit a baseline.
There’s an element of chance, and stuff like leetcode is just a veneer of science over a vibe based process, which conveniently scopes out management culpability. Personally, I think it’s hilarious that Silicon Valley types have essentially enshrined civil service exams for hiring.
> Being a good developer and being a scammer are completely uncorrelated variables.
One could expect good developers to be less inclined to fraud as they may not “need” it as much.
That also made me thing of Berkson’s paradox: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
If these were really independent traits they would look negatively correlated as we talk about people who are good OR scammers.
It's not about need, it's about beating the system. The "hack".
The “need” of beating the system. Good developers may or may not have a lower deficit of “it”.
IMO being a good corporate developer is not very correlated with being a good "hacker" (finding ways to exploit systems). They may be correlated a little but not very. Being a good startup founder is probably correlated with being a good hacker, much more than being a good corporate developer is. Startups have to find and exploit niches.
Exactly. It's so bleak that this industry throws integrity out the window in the name of productivity.
With due respect, they probably just asked leetcode-esque and sys design questions.
There’s literally no evidence they did either of these things. I really hope these companies can explain their hiring process as it reflects badly on them that they keep calling him top 0.1% without any explanation of their process.
One of them didn’t. They just said they have the best system to pick candidates, that they’ve learned at their respective FAANG places, and that it can’t fail.
This.
The had 100 candidates and hired him. Top 1% QED. (/s)
> I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer.
> Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.
People who regularly don't show up for work are by definition not "top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates" - in fact quite the opposite.
That'll get you fired from PetSmart, let alone some bullshit $250k/yr software job.
I think startups' freewheeling management and hiring practices need examined because this would be caught by the most basic of background or reference checks at any traditional business.
Can't wait for Paul Graham's next essay on "How to Not Hire People Who Smoke Crack In the Toilets Instead of Showing Up for Work" for more informative life lessons.
You're replying to a quote about where their skill falls compared to others, and then saying it's wrong based on their contribution to the company. You're not wrong that it means they aren't top 1% in terms of value as an employee, but it's a separate topic to the quote you're replying to.
A disinterested Richard Feynman is a better physicist than a very interested highschooler. Skill and value extraction are not the same thing.
we interviewed him and passed. he was horrible. it blows my mind seeing these reports of him crushing interviews and being a great dev. the bar for programmers is woefully low. on second thought there's got to be more to this story because he came to us through a recruiter who talked him up big time. did he come to you through a recruiter too? if so then either the recruiter is in on it or he has an army of different recruiters getting him in front of yc people. also you say you worked with him in person but other reports say he was in india. something not adding up here. i can verify my story by giving you the Nth character of the quirky email address he uses. can you do the same?
It’s probably because the interview process relied heavily on leetcode questions. If it did, one can effectively prepare for that and only that and can be overemployed.
I assume its because his resume showed hes worked at sexy startups recently (true or not)
Having worked at sexy-startup for 9 months recently with a good excuse why you left would get your resume to the top of the pile if it was read
Is it still common to ask leetcode questions during interview?
Leetcode questions are still the primary way to test skill in interviews.
Where? I have candidates solve a real closed-ended problem in the space we’re working in. I also give them a lot of source code to read and respond to and find issues with.
But this approach takes a certain amount of time and effort, and requires interviewers who are skilled at interviewing.
Leetcode provides an extremely lazy and cheap way of “solving” the problem of assessing an applicant’s skills.
most medium to large size companies
No explanation has been provided to show hes good at leetcode either.
I'm intrigued by this guy, he could only have a few years of experience. What does he have to show for it resume wise? Has he ever built something, oversaw a large project, contributed meaningfully - and does he back this well in his interviewing?
What type of interview you have, I presume non LeetCode style?
> he's actually a very skilled engineer
By that you mean more like "he is top 0.1% at leetcode and whatever broken hiring process we have" ?
Why would really top 0.1% engineer go for all the hustle with small startups. If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?
This doesn't add up at all, sorry.
> If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?
There is a high risk that the AI bubble will collapse.
> Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates
How do you measure that ? It seems like he wasn't a good candidate after all. I hope y`all learn a lesson about hiring and moving away from things that aren't signal to a job.
Do employment contracts in the US not normally have "sole focus" clauses? We have those in my location.
I think Google has that.
Possibly these are becoming more common because of /r/overemployed.
Most companies don't want you working another W-2 job, but realize they can't just ban all consulting.
I think an copyright/IP assignment contract is standard in many or most U.S. software jobs, at least when working for a big enough company that they have a lawyer who handles the NDA/employment paperwork.
That pretty much automatically rules out over employment because you can’t separately promise two different companies that you’re assigning all software copyrights to them rather than you, it’s an incompatible contract (even if it’s limited to work hours - you’re pretending to both companies that you’re working 9-5 solely for them).
A large percentage of U.S. software jobs (and probably nearly all YCombinator startups) are in California. Other states might be different, but stuff you do outside of work doesn't automatically become your employer's IP in California.
There are some nuances and I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of it is that three ways to trigger the IP to attach to your employer:
1. You do it on-prem or during work hours (but work hours are flexible for salaried employees)
2. You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)
3. It's reasonably related to what you or other people do at your day job
If none of those apply, then you own it. That's relevant to the discussion at hand because, at least in California, you could work from home for two companies with unrelated businesses and not break any rules.
> You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)
Familiar to fans of HBO's _Silicon Valley_!
You can do anything - the question is whether you'll get caught and then whether you'll get punished. Does the employer have anything to gain by suing the employee in these cases?
All successful big tech businesses - all of them - got that way by openly breaking laws. They don't trigger automatically, but upon a manual review, triggered by someone with at least a couple grand to spend on the endeavour. A lot flies under the radar in practice.
I have seen that in employment paperwork at a few companies. Generally, you just mention you have side jobs and they okay it. Or you ignore it entirely and nobody notices.
I don’t think so. Or at most it talks about “reasonable effort” or something vague like that.
/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing
Fascinating. My locality is usually kinda lax but it's something that we have.
I would have thought that with the litigious culture in the US and non-competes etc... this would all be watertight. Seems kinda ridiculous that with a non-compete you can't work for a competitor once you've quit but you're free to do so while you still work for your employer, lol.
I think these might soon be called Soham clauses, to be a bit cheeky.
Employment contracts in the US are rare.
Employment contracts that are reduced to a single explicit written agreement are relatively rare in the US, most employment contracts are implied by conduct.
Wow, that's interesting. I didn't know that.
A lot of people think of "contract" as specifically a written document, but that's not what a "contract" is in law, the written document (if it exists) can be very powerful evidence that (1) there is a contract, and (2) what its terms are, but contracts exist without them.
While US employment is usually at will without a defined contract term, there are mutually enforceable obligations, including some definition of what the employee is obligated to do for the employer and that the employer is obligated to pay the employee at some specified rate assuming the employee's obligations are met. That's a contract. Exactly what the detailed terms are may be difficult to prove absent a single comprehensive written document, but it is a contract.
That being said, "employment contract" colloquially connotes more than "agreement to trade labor for X salary." It implies something other than at-will employment, for one thing.
What good is a contract if you can’t prove what its terms are? Such a contract is worth the paper it’s printed on.
They do print the terms on paper. Usually, companies that don’t have a formal contract that both the employee and employer sign will still write down all the important information. First the employer sends an offer letter containing important information unique to the new employee, such as job title, compensation, work location, start date, etc. Then everything else is in some kind of employee handbook. The handbook details the expectations for every job title, the rules employees are expected to follow, rules for promotions and transfers, etc, etc. Together these have everything you would expect in a contract that both the employee and employer sign, and they are just as binding.
> Employment contracts in the US are rare.
Really? Does that mean what it say: you get a job and you do not get a written contract?
I don't think, in 38 years of working in 3 different countries, I've ever NOT had a written contract, even for temp or contractor roles. WTAF?
It’s not really rare, plenty of companies in the US use employment contracts. But a majority don’t, not in the European sense. Technically there is always a contract between any two parties who are cooperating; it doesn’t have to be formalized in any particular way as long as the cooperating parties have a common understanding of the terms and agree on them.
Many companies that don’t use formal contracts instead put all the information that is common to all employees into an employee handbook, and the details that are unique to a specific employee into the offer letter. The offer letter given to a new hire has details such as their starting salary and start date, and once they arrive they are given a copy of the handbook and often time to read it and discuss it with a manager. The handbook will explain in detail how promotions happen, the work expected from for various job titles, any rules the employees are expected to follow, etc, etc. Together these form the common understanding that underlies the contract, even if there is never a formal contract signed by both the employer and the employee.
Contractors, on the other hand, always have a formal contract. Often a contractor spends a significant amount of their time negotiating these contracts, especially the scope of work. I should know, I worked as a contractor for many years.
For established companies, I've always had a written employment agreement which discussed some terms common to all employees, including anti-moonlighting, usually ip assignment, etc. But I don't think I've ever had a contract that described what I going to do... maybe when I worked for a school district, but there my position title didn't actually match the work anyway; the position title was about being a tech helper in the classroom, but my position was at the district office with field work that only rarely had interaction with students.
I am shocked, and FWIW so is my wife (Czech) and my elderly mum.
Yes, really.
Executives can be an exception.
Exceptional circumstances are an exception.
Increasingly less common union jobs are an exception.
But ‘at will’ is far more common in the US.
I'm worried people are going to start going after burnt out employees thinking they're over employed because it looks the same from the outside and there's no way to prove a negative.
I don't think anyone has the morals or trust anymore for the way we used to do corporate work.
Maybe Earth could stop policing entire populations (a very profitable enterprise) of various ecosystems and return to policing the small percentage of the population that abuses the ecosystem for their own selfish gain? Generally, a small percentage of any population abuses the ecosystem and creates restrictions for the population as a whole. Fix THAT problem, and you solve a myriad of other related problems for entire populations. Character questions are forbidden in the USA as they might lead to 'discrimination.' But 'discrimination' is where one discerns a preference between something desirable and something undesirable? Historically the abuse of 'discrimination' created the legal restrictions that foster this situation where a candidate's character cannot be assessed accurately. Soham proves that the people doing the interviewing are less discerning than they believe themselves to be. Good character seldom is discerned during an interview. Also 'good' character relative; what 'Christians' or 'Westerners' consider to be good character is different from what other cultures accept or tolerate. In summary, caveat emptor.
Like a cheater and a jerk. Doesn't matter how talented someone is, if they're too arrogant, then the no *sshole rule means they must adapt to expectations or find somewhere else.
If they're so talented, then they should probably work on their own thing.
This field would be so much better off good engineering meant being good at following through on projects instead of being good at gaming interviews.
Source: anonymous account created one day ago.
k
did you notice any hints of him cheating on the interview with LLMs? If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people
> If he's actually that good for real, I'm surprised why he won't want to do it legit, he'd go way further than scamming people
If you can get and hold dozens of concurrent full-time engineering jobs by scamming people, you can get much further much more quickly than is possible in any one of the full-time engineering jobs you can get.
This is obviously unethical, relies on non-guaranteed success, and falls apart if people are able to effectively claw back your gains from scamming, but that's not (obviously) enough to outweigh the desire for quick returns for some people.
> effectively claw back your gains from scamming
Do you really think several busy startups are going to band up and sue a person (esp in California)?
Well. Was George Santos an anomaly or proving of a hypothesis? If the hypothesis were structured like so:
If we have a pile of shit, surely shit eaters will be attracted to it
In which case George Santos is just a very testable hypothesis (it's like watching a 5 year old walk up to a cookie jar when the adults are gone). Congress attracts a certain type. What did you attract and why is an unavoidable question. In fact, it's scientific. You would think tech people would recognize the locust of non technical people entering the industry as some kind of an indicator, some measurable thing ...
We need to run more formal scientific experiments to document what happened in this industry.
What was your interview process like? I think that would be helpful information in helping design a better vetting procedure to avoid this in the future.
This is what we call a hustler.
Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t, but keeping the myth going even if it comes with bad stories is valuable.
Do companies not call references or former places of employment anymore? I am surprised he kept the scam so long when these jobs could've just called his previous work who'd tell them a story like you said.
I don't doubt he's in the 1% or 0.1% of candidates you're interviewing, but there is one very simple solution startups could apply to make it easier to find top talent -> remove "US ONLY" from their job listings.
You might not be aware, but hiring outside of the country causes a whole slew of other points of friction and complexity. It actually isn't "one very simple solution" in practice, which is why many startups don't do it.
I have done it as a hiring manager, it's really not that hard.
1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service
2. You can also not hire them, and use their services as independent contractors instead. I've never had an issue doing this with my finance teams, as long as the contractor submits a valid invoice they don't care who they are. Plus, it's good for cashflow (net 30 to net 90 is pretty standard) and the hire gets a nice tax save on their end.
I do understand that at large companies it can be tricky, but IMHO at startups there is little excuse. I suppose it all doesn't matter if you're playing with unlimited silicon valley VC money, I've only ever had to deal with european investors and they love a bit of smart frugality.
Oh so you’re not American but you’re explaining how obvious it is that American companies should hire outside of America
I agree if I had the UK talent pool domestically, European investors, a different health insurance regime, and existed in a different timezone, the calculus might be different.
Aside: how many people were at the company where you were paying recruiters $25k to find people?
Lol because foreigners aren't known for being scammers.
Being employed in four companies is obviously not sustainable, but half of that is fairly common.
I know several people who spent months working for two companies: one full time, the other part time. The most productive few would reach two full time positions and actually keep delivering for over a year.
The reason this happens at all is that sufficiently large organisations expect performance to be in a specific range - if it's too low you'll be fired, but going the extra mile will not yield benefits, as your compensation is decided by the assigned budget and promotions are rare.
Case in point: a few years ago my former co-worker was given "overtime" which was actually a hidden raise, as management really wanted to keep him, but couldn't officially increase his compensation. The organisation for which we worked eventually cracked down on such practices, so he left to work at a place which would compensate him this much and more without resorting to such tricks.
THIS. Companies establish the minimum level of productivity acceptable by keeping the lowest performer. There's very little benefit in producing much beyond that level in most organizations. What do you do with all the extra time if you're a superstar? You could give it to your employer for free or sell it on the open market by acquiring another job and profiting off your own performance.
Having a side hustle or even excessively volunteering isn't much different in terms of workload. A lot of people do this. It's always the meetings that are the hard part.
For most of us, our J2 is chatting on Hacker News. These guys make it pay.
Your definition of common is likely not the same as most people's. If this even broke 1 in a thousand I would be in awe. Most folks can't even keep up with their single job and life (family obligations and what not). Managing multiple is not something that will cross their mind.
That's an interesting way to put it. I was overemployed from 2021 to 2024. I worked two full-time start-up jobs (well, a W2 job and a full-time contract position that was for all intents and purposes a full-time W2 job, just that it paid me without the deductions and such). When one company shut down, I continued doing contract work but not at a full-time capacity.
During my tenure at both companies, my higher-ups liked my performance so much that when it was time to select people for raises/promotions/rate increases etc, I was among the few selected. I took this as a sign that my half-performance was valued enough to earn me more money so I wanted to stay like this forever. Alas, it didn't.
I'm extremely fortunate that everyone was pretty flexible. If I couldn't make a daily standup (or whatever regular meeting), I'd just say I can't make it and no one would ask why. Same if I had to leave a meeting early. As long as I got my stuff done, no one complained.
And really, that's what I appreciated the most. I'd happily work for either single one of these companies simply because they just respected everyone's time and treated everyone like adults. I acknowledge that I was technically taking advantage of this trust by working a separate job, but I cannot stress enough how happy my employers were with my half-performance. So as you mentioned, it's either give full-performance to one company for half-pay (or well, regular pay I guess), or give half-performance to two companies for double-pay. The economics made perfect sense, and because the companies felt good about the value they were getting from me for their money, I didn't feel guilty.
But it did make me think -- how many other people are giving full-performance to a company when half-performance would be satisfactory, if not exemplary? Especially now in the age of AI where many people are more productive than ever, why couldn't companies consider a full work-week 20 hours a week instead of 40, if they can still extract the same value? I think most individuals would be so much happier to work under those circumstances, and if they wanted to fill in the rest of the 20-hour week with another job they could, and not have to play this game.
I mean, the obvious answer is obvious, but a guy could dream.
people above and around you prefer if you stay within the range. over performing stresses other people out and causes conflict.
https://reddit.com/r/overemployed
https://youtu.be/IWMngMm3_88
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 founders to chase top 1% talent in some cases. In other cases the product is terrible but they think hiring an amazing programmer will pull them out of the dive. It won’t. Just hire normal people and build normally.
My advice to companies who wants to hire 10x programmers is always:
Either pick someone inside who really wants the job, or find a brilliant new graduate who really wants the job.
It’s usually safer and cheaper.
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.
One effect is a fresh set of eyes. When I started my last job I immediately reorganised a pile of stuff in useful ways just based on my previous job - which made up for not knowing anything about the local lay of the land as yet. It can give your first few months a real perception boost!
And how much delay is caused by waiting for that developer to show up and get hired?
Yep, you are also right.
> I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process.
This is what makes this story so funny. A lot of people are mad at the guy that found an exploit in the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system without a lick of ire directed at the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system.
Like if everybody’s profile on a dating app said “only interested in talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger”, then somebody’s eventually going to get catfished by a fake Kindergarten Cop. It’s kind of a “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” situation
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.
I have to say this treating other engineers as God attitude is really weird.
Other engineers make horrendous mistakes too. Other engineers just get by too.
If you think a piece of paper means really a lot, then so be it.
I honestly don't understand that, as well. I am a real engineer on paper and now do full-time software development. The funny thing is, "real" engineers mostly think that programming computers is like doing magic. Meanwhile, many software developers think that "real" engineers are somehow special..
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
> 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.
What if you did engineering before and just moved to software engineering because that somehow pays more than the noble profession of engineering?
Much like many attorneys that instead choose the less noble profession of police officer. Yes, that does happen, but it’s not the scenario that most software people consider when arbitrarily choosing such lofty false titles. Most software people were never licensed electrical/mechanical/civil engineers.
I don't think anyone who hired him has any future credibility when it comes to hiring
* "He's a great engineer" - Yet he's ineffective at doing the job and touch fired him? * "He's top 0.1%" - Of what exactly? How can it be the case when you fired him?
You literally didn't do reference checks properly and you got caught out. And it's all written like these companies are the victims. You're better off admitting that you don't know how to hire.
Soham's behaviour is one thing, but working for any of these companies he was at is a literal red flag.
We hired him — and plenty of other great engineers after who didn’t pull his stunt.
You never really know what someone will do after they’re onboarded, even if they ace the interviews. When people say he’s a good engineer, they mean he crushed pair programming and skill tests. When he actually showed up, he did good work. Problem was he was juggling so many jobs he was always making excuses as to why he wasn't available. And he wasn’t upfront as to why.
We do reference checks. But when someone kills your interviews, you have to move fast or risk losing them to another offer. Time kills deals - and the best candidates usually get multiple offers. Waiting for every reference isn’t always an option. Most people are ethical, so you trade some risk for speed. In Soham’s case, one reference checked out, the other never replied. A few unaffiliated references said they remembered him from previous stops on the resume but hadn't worked with him directly.
If someone starts making excuses right away or seems off, it’s your job to cut them loose fast. Most companies did just that.
Reference not responding is a red flag.
Yep. All these startups are probably shit.
The amount of people saying “yeah he’s a great engineer” with the only supporting piece of evidence being “he cracked our leetcode interviews” is bonkers.
“He’s a great engineer.”
“Also, he never shipped anything good.”
Hiring is completely broken in a lot of tech. Getting the right companies on your resume early on — regardless of your skills — makes you a made person. And then if you know how to game interviews, you’ll be double made.
@sama's Triple Byte ostensibly tried to "solve" this and did nothing but make it worse. As a candidate, they lied to me saying "I had the 'best' score ever on their screening process". Ironically, I ended up at Meta where the interviewing process is somewhat like Google's but now even more difficult technically.
I wish he was never caught. The companies deserved that
Realize that a lot of candidates who followed the rules and told the truth were screwed out of jobs. Right now there are massive layoffs and lots of good people are out of jobs and this guy is being praised by sticking it to “corporate greed”?
Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?
> "Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?"
You say that like you're unaware that huge numbers of people (I doubt anywhere near a majority, but significant numbers certainly) DO think that he is a hero who deserves to be pardoned.
For a quick example, see https://x.com/search?q=Free%20luigi&src=typed_query
I wouldn't call far-left terrorists "people".
I'm sure you would be in good company with them, as you have also given up morality in order to dehumanize those to whom you are opposed.
If there were more like him, powerful people would be less unhinged.
Wow that escalated quickly. I'm just saying why would an engineer who's been rewarded a seat at a company based on his leetcode abilities think that the company cares about anything else.
It's the surest signals of overrated candidates who lead with egos rather than results and an overrated hiring process with easily-fooled people who can't see it.
This is my question too.
I'm no longer job searching but every interview involved multiple steps and "background checks."
I'm seeing the dude's resume has him working half a dozen jobs in a year which even to me is a huge red flag. Then he has a github with automated commits... I don't want to be disparaging to start ups because its brutal out there but how does someone like that have such a high success rate? Is he taking a super low salary or something?
On Twitter some of the founders discussed this. He would give references to people who answered the phone and then praised his work generically. One person said they thought it was strange that both of his reference checks seemed like really young guys, but it's the startup world so they overlooked it.
There was one Tweet from someone who said they did a reference check from someone who said he did good work when he was working, but he was working multiple jobs at the same time so he wasn't working much. Maybe he assumed his references wouldn't be checked often, and maybe he was right?
To add to this. It would be great to see which companies he interviewed at but didn't get the job. Would argue those companies have better BS-detectors conducting the interviews.
For my last job — the guy who was supposed to verify my permanent address called me and asked me to ask someone in my village to take a photo of the house with same day newspaper in the view and send it to him. I forwarded the request to my future employer asking whether it was the normal verification procedure :-)
Unicorns are easier to find than newspapers. If you threaten to shoot me unless I bring newspaper - I am not even sure where they sell them anymore in my city.
Last time I was in New York City I could not for the life of me find a paper copy of the New York Times to read. Newsstands appear to just be selling candy and drinks.
You can get the New York Times and other newspapers in airports still. I do still buy a newspaper before a flight sometimes, but I actually shouldn't because flights have WiFi now.
Irrational and nostalgic.
Yes - I know you can get them in airports (lounges often give them out for free) - I just thought it a little bizarre that I couldn't find a copy of the New York Times in midtown Manhattan!
Background checks come in different varieties, usually it's criminal and global watchlist checks. Employment and education check is couple $$ extra for the employer, and some employers really don't mind.
It’s also possible to “freeze” your employment history report just like you can freeze your credit report. Which prevents even companies with the wherewithal to do an employment history check from getting that information.
Interesting, how do to that "freeze"? I thought it's all data brokers I don't have any leverage on.
https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
You have to do it via a mailed-in form, but I did, and got a confirmation letter back. I haven't assessed the efficacy of it, but supposedly mine is.
age
What I find cringeworthy is @Suhail saying they thought he was in the US but actually was in India—outing his company as not checking employment eligibility [0]. If he was actually allowed to work in the US—which doesn't seem to be the case since he hasn't responded to any replies asking about this—then they hired someone who underperformed, or in the worst case violated a company policy they might have that employees cannot have another job. Hardly seems like something worth shouting from rooftops.
[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940441569276158190
The Tweet clearly says they fired in him the first week and confronted him about the lying/scamming. It seems very clear that they figured it out right away and confronted him about it.
But they haven't checked his employment eligibility or he wouldn't have started his first week.
Legally, you have three days to complete an I-9 after starting a new position.
Given that there's no oversight of the verification process, that can slide, too.
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 when we discovered the multiple jobs)
> he's a really talented engineer, crushed our interviews.
Think it says a lot about this industry if "really talented 'engineer'" means passing loads of gamified interviews and not delivering things on time.
But the person you’re responding to said he did a solid job for almost a year.
That’s pretty faint praise.
He was a solid middle of the pack contributor on net, but it was clear he was way stronger than his net output just from interactions with him (he had great products ideas, clear technical understanding of many areas, etc).
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?
Perhaps he's talented at interviewing? Turns out this is the only skill you really need...
> worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job
All I hear is "really good at interviewing."
The people assessing his talent are falling for the same delusion as the people conducting the interview.
If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.
in fairness to some interview processes there are ways you could legit pass a valid interview and then short change the job. We do a problem scenario / proposed solution that's shared a few days in advance. Good candidates (and good frauds) can ace this with strong technical skills, relevant experience and maybe an hour or so of prep time. We'd take this as strong signal, because (and I'd hope more companies do this) we're optimizing for talented candidates, not minimizing people who are going to work multiple concurrent jobs.
> but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing.
In my opinion and experience, being a competent developer and being a good interviewer are even less related than being a competent developer and being a good interviewee (and the latter are already very unrelated).
https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/pol/fraud/resistance.html
mid-level output, clearly had more capability than his output suggested from his ideas and some particularly strong contributions
Did he just lie and say he wasn't working at those places? Or did the question never come up?
When I used to interview I always had to check a box that said I wasn't currently employed, or they would ask at some point.
funny thing was he had other places on his linkedin under "active employment" but we never really dug into it (until we learned he was full-time there) because he just seemed like the kind of person who wouldn't keep his LinkedIn up to date.
Why would you let him go if he was doing a solid job?
When we had an OE person they could do good work if you gave them a lot of time, but getting them to communicate and be present with the team was hell. You had to always be tracking them down, getting them to respond, and working any meetings (which we had few of) into some narrow time slot where they were available.
It also drags everyone else down. The team figures out what's going on. They get tired of adjusting their communication around the one person who's always distracted and doing something else.
Basically, it turns into a lot of work for everyone else to get work out of the OE person. Like they can do good work, but they're going to make everyone else work hard to extract it from them because they're busy juggling multiple jobs.
All of the Soham stories I've read today have been the same: Good work when he was working, but he was caught because he wasn't working much.
Yes. He could do solid work when you narrowly define it but he probably sank the productivity and morale of people he was working with.
Individual performance doesn’t matter. Team performance does. All of this work to find 10x engineers is meaningless if they can’t raise the output of the team itself. People can make their teams better (sometimes with elite communication skills instead of technical), but we should be focusing more on building 10x teams, not trying to find unicorns.
Yeah, this looks like a cargo culting. Don't need work, need the guy to belong only to them...
People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.
It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.
> People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.
It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.
I had the same experience as you with an "overemployed" person: Working with them is really bad for everyone else. They lie, play extreme politics, throw teammates under the bus, make you work harder for everything, and they don't care if it causes you harm because you're just a temporary coworker at one of their "Js"
There's nothing to celebrate about these people. They screw over their teammates far more than the company they work for.
> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs
What blows my mind is people think overemployment of an engineer is bad, but it is more than acceptable for CEO to held top positions in different companies.
CEOs get fired too when a board with sufficient power doesn’t feel like they are performing.
The difference is in most cases the CEO owns the business or a good chunk of it so they’re actually capital owners and employees in name only. If you own the business you make the rules.
> If you own the business you make the rules.
To the extent.
I own my skills and I make the rules. To the extent.
I mean, most of my experience with large companies is that things are usually better for my team when the executive team is leaving us alone. A note here and there is nice; but any more focus and it's not great... better for everyone if they're busy doing something else. :P
It’s not acceptable
I think you just described most of the C level executives in the tech industry. They leave companies behind destroyed, with a big pay check. But it’s unethical if simple engineers do it. Sure.
Not sure what your direct experience is, but the difference I've experienced first hand is that C-suite are INTENSELY focused on the single company but only for a relatively short period of time. They're not spread too thin; they're motivated solely by short-term incentives. An OE engineer is both, and we can agree they all suck for people who want to do meaningful work and build an awesome team - but they seem very different to me.
> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.
What about people that put full effort and then some into jobs with long hours and loads of stress just to get hit with a PIP or get caught in the latest round of layoffs?
If that's how companies treat people, what's so wrong with 'overemployed' people having a fallback, especially in today's market?
Simple: Two wrongs don't make a right.
Most people are not putting full effort into their jobs, which is why we are considered heros.
So you could fight us, but plenty just join us in playing games, lowering expectations, and collecting their check and going home. We are awful colleagues if you have ambition, but if you do not, we get along fine with people.
How often do people put full effort into even one job? I do enough to move my career forward and to keep myself employed. Everything else is just working for free.
This is a really good perspective, and I've seen a similar impact from "under employed" members of my teams. We have group-level product managers who have several scrum team-level PMs under them. The idea is they keep broader alignment and bigger-picture consistency, but when they don't spend time with each of the scrum teams, or miss planning meetings and important discussions the teams pay the price from lack of communication, coordination and a shared understanding.
It’s called team building. You can believe in it or not. You can join a company that values that, or not.
Where is the line between team and cult?
Cults are a subset of teams.
> Where is the line between team and cult?
Typically employers pay you and cults don't.
Cults can provide food, housing, and pay.(scientology employs alot of its members)
Why do you need to draw a line? Can there be good cults and bad teams?
Both have implicit contracts, and a contract requires consideration on both sides. The parties define the value of the consideration, so you can have a junior cult member who feels they are getting good value for what they pay, or a SW dev at an insurance company who feels they don't. I also don't see much difference in your ability to affect your situation if you are unhappy with the current state.
The whole idea of a cult is negative.
Its like saying why cant there be good shark attacks on surfers.
Defining traits of cults are that they try to brainwash you, destroy your identity and replace it with one the cult approves of.
This can happen to various degrees of severity.
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.
Sometimes it's NDA. Depends on what company does, but it's hard to imagine a product that does not compete with e.g. Google.
trust. he was not forthcoming when confronted with the "this other company says you are full-time and just went to their offsite - is that true?"
It seems to me a really talented engineer would deliver more than solid work, no?
Why bother, when you get the paid the same regardless?
I don’t know the guy, but I feel like a lot of people are missing this angle - just because you’re technically capable, doesn’t mean you’re actually motivated or that you actually bother to deliver. You can also be lazy and just collect your check.
This is my experience for the past 10 years I've been working in the industry. As soon as someone finds out I am more capable at something than the rest of the colleagues on the team I get to do all the work in that area yet receive nothing in return. Every time I tried to bring something up as an example of doing something more my achievements were downplayed as part of the regular duties or my mistakes were put on the pedestal instead. There were also calls to do more, even though I already was doing more than the average programmer on the project. Nothing was ever enough.
In my current job I aimed to be painfully average at everything I do and so far I haven't seen any difference. I still get the same reviews I was getting all these years and the salary increases are still as mediocre as the ones I was getting when I was trying my best. My only fear is that this strategy might lead to complete stagnation. I am already bored out of my mind and I would switch jobs in a heartbeat, but I can't currently do that due to variety of reasons.
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.
The VPs, heads of, and C levels of most of the companies I have worked for were also pretending to be working. They knew the company wasn’t profitable, they gave a couple of advices here and there, and then left the company. Big pay checks. Now they are doing the same all over again in other companies.
Tired of considering this “normal” and nobody talking about it. But when one simple engineer does it, well, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, yada yada.
Get real. There's a difference between a self-proclaimed fraudster and an ineffectual executive. In intention, if not in effect.
In as much as there is a difference between a performing magician and one who shows you how a trick is done maybe
Every manager and employer should skim through that subreddit. When I stumbled onto it I felt like Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense, where the truth was revealed and every flashback moment suddenly made sense and lined up. Until then, things just felt “off” but it was hard to put a finger on what was actually going on.
I guess impromptu Slack huddles work for quickly finding this out in the first weeks...
Only when all jobs do this at the same time.
There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.
Anecdotally I'd argue that it's not just "plenty", but the majority of people who only work one single job barely and/or pretend to work. I regularly see Principal+ engineers, VPs and Directors waddling around looking important or just staring at their monitors with a glazed over look.
Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, why not dedicate the remaining 20 hours to another corp, and double your comp? Everyone wins.
HackerNews dudes claiming they do a true minimum 40 hours per week, every week, forever, of heads-down hard-work are deluding themselves. I really don't understand the overemployment hatred this forum has. There are plenty of folks who really do solid work at 2+ jobs, not half-assing and politicking.
Disclaimer: I am not OE.
This is why there’s a push to the four day workweek. People get just as much done, they just use their time more efficiently.
When people with no integrity or ethics defraud their employers, "it's life"?
Yes. It's the same with wage theft.
Wage theft vastly outstrips other forms of theft[0] and it's considered a complete non priority by law enforcement, politicians, and the media.
These kinds of things just aren't a priority for one reason for another. Let's brainstorm some solutions to wage theft and overemployment.
I suggest a synergistic approach -- fix wage theft and it'll have a knock-on effective with things like overemployment or people pretending to work a single job.
What do you think?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft#/media/File:Wage_th...
How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.
We pretend to work, they pretend to pay.
but these people attend too many meetings; the OE ones miss everything.
> 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.
Why.
I have worked in VC-backed startups for over a decade. The individual employee isn't going to change the direction of the company regardless of how hard they work.
The people who make or break the startup are the founders. Even the middle managers do not matter. If the founders / top level leaders have no idea what they are doing and do not want to make money, nothing a single engineer does even matters.
The best thing an engineer can do in that scenario is give advice and do work as prescribed. Trying to save the founders from themselves is a recipe for going crazy and burning out.
Taking current state of Reddit, with all the rage-bait and other sorts of creative writing, I wonder how much of that is legit content.
How many of those are bots? How many are teenagers? How many are playing pretend? 90% would be a conservative estimate.
That makes you the sucker.
For trusting people to fulfil their employment contract?
What is the alternative, micromanage and monitor everyone? I am in the camp I want to trust people, especially highly skilled and highly paid employees.
> to have your coworker pretending to be working.
I don't think this is uncommon.
This makes no sense. The whole thing is idiotic. Seems to be a combination of LARP and some people trying to push a narrative.
If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.
>If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.
You won't earn more. I've considered that at one point and most adverts on freelance sites like Upwork are written by people who are either clueless or downright insane. These people usually want you to create a completely new system from scratch using technologies of their choosing and the offers are like $8-$15 per hour or $800 for work that is supposed to take months to complete. Why would anyone want to agree to do that when apparently getting steady paychecks from multiple companies is an option?
There are other platforms that are not public and require vetting.
Also, most of my contracts have come through referral. It's absolutely possible to survive freelancing as a software engineer.
On upwork you are competing with people from third world countries who can offer vastly lower prices.
Also the quality of the work is bottom of the barrel.
What you want to do is look for small to mid sized companies in your area and solve problems for them. You gonna build up your network and reputation.
There is a good reason many people don't go freelance, it is not for everyone. You need some really good social and business skills and it can be stressful. But the money is sure there.
I did two full-time jobs for a month as part of changing jobs fifteen years ago and it’s exceedingly intense but otherwise was fine; eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have. Employers don’t like this because that’s a lot of work they could have persuaded an employee to provide as unpaid overtime labor instead; much this outrage is simple jealousy. If you’re doing the job to the specifications requested at a sufficient level to remain employed, then they have no basis to cry outrage. Employment is just as monogamous as marriages are: sometimes, not always.
24-18 = 6 hours "non-working" time. Eating, washing and shitting is min 1 hour/day.So 5 hours of bed time with around 4.75 hrs of sleep at most, because we don't fall asleep right away.
The math doesn't work long term. It may be kept for 1-2 months even when a person is 21 yrs old, but I doubt it it can be sustained more than that.
They said 18 waking hours, not working hours
It doesn’t necessarily take 18 hours a day to do two full-time jobs for a full workday. Certainly I’ve never spent longer than three weeks doing 16h/day! I don’t advise it.
I've never seen that perspective.
Work has always been a distraction from my hobbies. _Always_. Sometimes they're related, but often they're not.
Though... Your stance lines up with people who work well into their retirement years while not needing the income? I'd struggle to give two weeks notice if I suddenly had enough money to live on for the rest of my life.
I like work because work provides value for other people. I don't like hobbies because hobbies provide value only to myself, and I am already worth enough as I am. What's there not to get?
I get it; I just hadn't seen anyone say it before.
IE your hobby is work.
> eighteen hour waking days leave a lot of boredom time, no matter how many hobbies you have
Lol - you don't have enough hobbies.
Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I was bored as an adult - the times I was bored as a kid, it was because adults were making be somewhere or do something that wasn’t engaging.
I literally have a computer at hand 24/7 now, I’m almost never bored. It’s kinda crazy to think about much of a change that is.
Turns out I prefer some of my hobbies to benefit other people’s goals, which is often sated by employment.
Isn’t this just a cringey way to say you prefer your hobbies to make money.
No? If I meant that, I would have said that. My current hobby that benefits others is reverse engineering something. I have no revenue plans or pathway for that effort, it’s been underway for five years, and it’s keeping my need to help occupied as I go through full-time school.
Most US citizens applying for software engineering jobs can't even get a response to their resume, and then I read stories like this.
Hiring managers and HR area increasingly only open to unicorn candidates that have the exact amount of experience in the exact tech stack. While a few of those people exist, it's definitely more likely they end up interviewing people that are open to lying. So now your pipeline is filled with 90% liars, some just small white lies and others who have made a resume that has exclusively tailored lies just for your org.
The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.
Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.
Yeah, it's really something to read this.
all the jobs are being outsourced is why
I'm hoping that the section 174 fix from the latest tax bill will slow this down significantly
I’ll be surprised if it does. Software jobs are slumping for several reasons and the section 174 hack fixes one for a while but causes between one to four other problems depending on where you live.
One to four other problems? what are they
Odds are this is a dev shop with more than one person doing at least some things. It would explain how “he” was able to get so many jobs and maintain appearances. And a lot of startups don’t have the best screening processes to begin with (have a beer with a founder, check out their source code, you’re hired!). This is exactly the place where the structure and processes of larger companies can be a benefit. And even then, people work multiple jobs and get away with it. It’s become popular post COVID.
Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.
Think so too. Also because different companies have different "reviews" of his work. Some saying he was only good at interviews, others saying the quality of work was good. Must have been diffferent people working.
How do you explain multiple places with in office work corroborating that he came into the office?
US companies are afraid of litigations or European labour laws (irrelevant if you hire a contractor) but will not hesitate to hire questionable people from 3rd world countries for about the same pay like they would europeans.
That's bonkers.
Solution: lie and pretend you're in India and relocating to the US. /s
There are places where pretending to be Indian will help you get a job. Just make sure you choose a good last name.
I read through one of his emails. This guy is great at communicating his interest and signaling himself as a "high performer".
Perhaps, he is also genuinely good at cracking these interviews. No wonder, he's been through so many of them.
this email? https://x.com/var_epsilon/status/1940492841232584745
That's a particularly terrible cold email, you can tell he didn't even bother applying some basic personalisation to it outside of [COMPANY_NAME]
Nutshell: Toxic founders who want developers to code 24X7 may hired him seeing this.
ding ding ding. both soham + recruiter implied he basically just codes day and night. our founder (yc) was drooling! there's a very specific type of company + founder that falls for this stuff. no surprise he targeted ai startups.
Yes, this is probably what happened. Not like he was a super human engineer.
Interviewing really is a distinct skill from contributing and the more people crank it the more it seems to test for interview ability.
IQ tests are also distinct skills but IQ scores are the most quantifiable and studied numbers in all of psychology and correlate with all kinds of things like job performance.
I think the purpose of the interview is the same thing. Even though there's no strong evidence for a correlation it's reasonable to believe intuitively that there is.
I suspect (and have seen some evidence) that the interviews he aced were algo-based. Doing well in these is very repeatable, with low additional effort. Behavioural are much harder to do at scale.
A handful of comments already alluded to it, but maybe YC startups aren’t as smart as they think they are when they are looking for their founding engineers. Especially when it’s just the two founders looking for find their early engineers and the one holding the mba is the one leading/hiring. East to dupe these folks early on?
We interviewed him. He actually had solid full-stack skills. But it was obvious he had other stuff going on. Hence, we didn't take him.
How was it obvious?
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 usually less structured (no silly ex-faang engineers/managers playing god). They usually pay less, ofc, hence the need to have a couple of jobs.
At least in western europe, it’s very hard to land a 130K job, but two 65K jobs? Rather fine.
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, so that's an avenue you could try out.
Here in Germany you are currently only allowed to work 48hours per week. Also there are strict laws for companies to actually track work time.
So it is absolutely impossible for someone here to have two full time jobs without committing working time fraud.
But even if you could, it would make literally no sense two have jobs as you earn vastly more with freelancing anyway. You would scam yourself.
The most optimal move is to have one regular job so you get health care and social security and do freelancing on the side. If you work contract allows that, of course.
not only that but the german tax system is designed in a way to make holding multiple jobs as unattractive as possible.
Really? Like, in Germany it's illegal for someone to have a full-time job doing software and then a side business making soap and selling it at a farmer's market on the weekend?
That's... peculiar.
No, that case would be fine if the side business would be being self-employed. No one cares how many hours you work if you are self-employed. (Mostly, I am simplifying here)
What is an issue is working employed for two jobs and going over the 48 hour limits.
Working that much is very unhealthy so the state needs to protect people from being exploited. People should be able to live from working full time. Having to work multiple jobs and to destroy your own health is morally abhorrent.
Under German law being employed by a company and being self-employed are legally very distinct things. If you are employed you get protection from being fired, you have to have health care, pay into the retirement fond and so on.
If you are self-employed you are on your own. You can decide if you use public or private health care, you need to figure out how to save up for retirement yourself and so own. You get more freedom but less protection. That is because the law realizes that working people need protection from exploitation but also wants to give freedom to those that want to try their own business.
> Working that much is very unhealthy so the state needs to protect people from being exploited.
I get that the state needs to protect people from being exploited but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about it.
It seems to me that it would be better if the state had policies in place to ensure that one full-time job (or less even) provided sufficient income to enable a person to live self-sufficiently and raise a family.
Working a full-time job and raising a family is often a more stressful thing than a single person working a job that requires over-time. I don't see why the state should regulate how someone without kids spends their free time if that person wants to work.
Some people are just naturally inclined to be active, whether it's some combination of work, family, volunteering, and sports activities while others are not. I have a friend who is constantly working and constantly going to concerts and playing on several sports teams. His life seems stressful to me and far beyond how I want to spend my life but he enjoys it.
The state shouldn't restrict people from choosing how to spend their time, but instead should strive to create a society where people aren't forced to spend too much of their time working to meet their basic needs, with the ultimate goal of gradually reducing the time needed to do so over time.
> I don't see why the state should regulate how someone without kids spends their free time if that person wants to work.
So single people that can work 60 hours a day would get all the careers options while the person raising children is left in the dust? Does not sound fair.
> Some people are just naturally inclined to be active, whether it's some combination of work, family, volunteering, and sports activities while others are not.
That sounds like a healthy mix of activities. On the other hand working 60 hours a week is not.
> The state shouldn't restrict people from choosing how to spend their time,
It does not. You can create your own business and work yourself to death if you wish to. Again, the protection is for those that are employed by others.
Or in other words: You are allowed to hurt your own health as an entrepreneur but you are not allowed to employ people in such a way that it excessively hurts their health, even if they "consent" to it. Thing is, they can't consent because there is a power imbalance. Even if you make laws that people working less hours should not be discriminated, you can't really stop it.
Not to mention someone who is a workaholic needs psychological help not the "freedom" to work more.
> but instead should strive to create a society where people aren't forced to spend too much of their time working to meet their basic needs, with the ultimate goal of gradually reducing the time needed to do so over time.
We already could already be working significantly less. I always like to link https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
That is just not how capitalism works. Yes, you can fight for wage increases. You can fight for limits of working hours. But those gains will have to be paid in blood.
You idea would only work under socialism which had the Subbotnik which was volunteer unpaid labor on the weekends for the betterment of society.
I understand the concern about exploitation, but there’s a fine line between protection and paternalism. Just because some people overwork themselves doesn’t mean everyone else should be forbidden from choosing to work more and it isn't obvious that working 60 hours a week hurts your health.
Raising kids is but one kind of life stressor and it's not the state’s job to "equalize" life paths by punishing those who don’t have children or want to pursue different goals. Instead, the state should ensure a strong safety net so people are free to find their own balance.
Some pursuits genuinely take a monk-like dedication to see breakthroughs and we shouldn't hobble ambitious people who want to undertake them in the interest of fairness. You're describing a world where someone can't become a viruouso cellist, pioneer a life saving neurosurgery technique or revolutionize computer architecture because someone else decides to have kids. That doesn't sit right with me -- it's a little too Harrison Bergeron.
People might want to throw themselves into intense work for a decade before changing direction and focusing on raising a family or giving back to their community. Or maybe they want to do that the other way, start a family first and then once their kids are adults they want to pursue dreams that they spent decades dreaming of. Flexibility and dynamism in life roles is part of a healthy society.
The role of the state should be to ensure that no one has to 60 hours a week to survive and to ensure that everyone has real opportunities to live their best life that they choose -- not to make that choice for them.
> doesn’t mean everyone else should be forbidden from choosing to work more
No one is forbidden to work more. You seem to miss that those laws apply to wage labor. You keep bringing up all kinds of work that have nothing to do with this.
> You're describing a world
I am describing the status quo in Germany and many other developed countries. The US are the outlier.
> someone can't become a viruouso cellist
No one is telling you how much or little you are allowed to practice an instrument. You can practice 24/7 in as far as the German state is allowed. Not to mention musicians that are self-employed anyway.
Same with the other points. You can dedicate all you waking time into practicing to solve leet code questions. You can focus everything on your research.
You can work on any hobby you have as much as little as you want. You do do as much research as you want. You can work on your own business as much as you want.
The ONLY, the ONLY thing you can't do is employ someone to work more than 48 hours per week. And reverse be employed on a job that requires you to work for more than 48 hours.
I think that is pretty reasonable.
> it's not the state’s job to "equalize" life paths by punishing those who don’t have children or want to pursue different goals.
Children used to have the freedom to work themselves to early death in mines and factories. It got so bad that it threatened the very foundation of society. So after that yeah people figured the state absolutely should protect children and families.
And again, this has nothing to do with wanting to equalize everyone. There are many areas where exceptional people can go.
A world where people are required to work on improving their skill set for free on their own time is not better than a world where they can receive financial compensation for doing so. Many places allow this and mandate overtime payment for doing so. If someone wants to pay me 1.5x or 2.0x as much for time spent on a task over 40 hours a week that seems like a very appealing prospect to me, especially if it was a task that I was otherwise going to spend my time doing for free.
I think that you're missing the broader point that I'm trying to make here which is this: Why should the state mandate a cap on voluntary employment, rather than focus on ensuring that no one needs to work that much to survive? A system that protects workers from coercion is great. But a system that also prohibits voluntary overcommitment, even when it's for personal growth, artistic mastery, or short-term goals, feels overly paternalistic and your example regarding child labour laws exemplifies that paternalism.
I feel like you're defending the system in Germany not because it's a better system as measured by some objective criteria but because it's the system that you identify with. Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion that a system where people are not allowed to pay other people for more than 48 hours of their time in a week a better system that leads to better outcomes than one where people are free to exchange their time in exchange for a wage with mandatory overtime?
> I feel like you're defending the system in Germany not because it's a better system as measured by some objective criteria but because it's the system that you identify with. Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion
This thread started by parent telling you how it is in Germany. Meanwhile, you have provided zero data or objective criteria yourself...
> If someone wants to pay me 1.5x or 2.0x as much for time spent on a task over 40 hours a week that seems like a very appealing prospect to me, especially if it was a task that I was otherwise going to spend my time doing for free.
Again, overtime is perfectly legal, we were just talking about the average working time per week.
> Why should the state mandate a cap on voluntary employment, rather than focus on ensuring that no one needs to work that much to survive?
Because the first one is the easiest way to ensure the later one. You are missing the power dynamic between employer and employee. That is they main point. It is just not possible for the extra work to be truly voluntarily.
It is the same principle why a boss having sex with their assistant is deeply unethical. Because the power dynamic. Even if we assistant is attracted to them. They know refusing could have consequences for their career.
Plus, that unicorn worker that wants to work more than 48 hours to make someone else rich and is otherwise a healthy, non workaholic individual, does not even exist. If someone is that driven they can just go freelancing and earn even more money.
You idea is solid in a vacuum but just doesn't work with the real power dynamics under capitalism.
> Is there any sort of data to back up the assertion that a system where people are not allowed to pay other people for more than 48 hours of their time in a week a better system that leads to better outcomes than one where people are free to exchange their time in exchange for a wage with mandatory overtime?
I mean the US has one of the worst work-life balances of any developed country, so yeah. Meanwhile Germany is pretty good in that regard. Again, most developed countries limit work time somehow.
Yes! It basically means you go full on freelance or just stay put with whatever job you have. I wanted to try freelancing before I quite my full time job but it's not that easy legally.
I am a bit confused why you think it is not easy. In fact you have the right to reduce your hours from full time to part time if your company employs more than 15 people. So you can easily make time for a freelancing job on the side.
Also you don't really need to track your hours when freelancing other than maybe for billing purposes so you really don't need to worry about hours anyway. Generally you are considered part-time self-employed when doing less than 18 hours per week.
Earning a bit on the side is really not an issue in Germany. In fact the combination of having a part time employed job and then doing freelancing is very popular.
What doesn't work is being full time employed at two companies but that would make no sense even if you could as you would earn much less and pay insane taxes.
> In fact you have the right to reduce your hours from full time to part time if your company employs more than 15 people.
Having the right and your employer agreeing to it isn't the same. Do you want people to go to the court if the employer denies it with the risk of losing the job?
>Also don't most work contracts expressly prohibit taking a second job
Every single full time work contract that wasn't written by a complete moron spells out that full time is in fact full time.
The overemployed crowd just ignores it an hope they don't get sued / word spreads / prior gigs won't reference
>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.
But when you have multiple jobs, doesn't admin end up being a greater proportion of your time since you have to deal with it for several companies?
It’s not that I may do it for fun precisely. I want to pay off my house, but I don’t see myself working for the next 30 years earning as much as I have been earning in the last 3 years. Economy is going bad, countries are in war, and everything is just getting harder… if I can double my income (and hence reduce by half the time I’m exposed as a worker to this society) then I’ll do it. Juggling between two jobs doesn’t sound that bad anymore.
Could you give me an example of these non demanding jobs? Just so I get sense of the type of company you mean.
He should pivot to giving talks on landing an interview and interviewing
The Wolf of YC Street.
The Davinci Leetcode
Leetcode me if you can
Exactly my thoughts after listening to founders saying he crushes all the interviews.
Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.
You the phrase about how when something becomes a metric it ceases to be a useful measure because everyone starts gaming it?
The same goes for hiring tricks. When some hiring signal becomes a trick that gets passed around by influencers, it ceases to become a useful hiring signal because everyone is gaming it.
If this guy started advertising his process, everyone would start doing his process and it would stop working.
You can proselytize all you want for thousands of years and you will never convert the whole world at once.
It also doesn't matter if his tricks stop being effective if he can still sell them effectively. He doesn't care about integrity, clearly, so that wouldn't be a problem for him.
Not true or else leetcode would be gone. They made a lot of money off the old paradigm and somebody will certainly take advantage of whatever comes next
who says he isn't
The problem is YC is the guild of copycats
If you write something for one startup, you can use it in other startups too
So, some people like him fit easily for them all
I can't even find one job. What's his secret?
Be competent and able to prove it. Work with in-demand tools - for me that's .NET, React, Azure, SQL dbs etc. For others it may be go, python, java, AWS, GCP whatever is in demand near you. Probably not Rust, C or C++ etc - I'm sure there's demand for that too but at least near me they're a lot rarer.
Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.
Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.
If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.
Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.
He perfected the hiring game, probably automated fake activity on his GitHub, lied on his resume, among other things: https://leaderbiography.com/soham-parekh/
There are a few comments from the companies that hired him in the og twitter thread [0]. Sounds like he was actually really good at interviews. Kinda shows how broken the hiring system is if you can smash an interview but fail catastrophically at the job.
[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940287384131969067
He was good at the office politics kabuki. Wore the right masks and all.
GP is asking how is he able to land multiple jobs in the first place when they can’t even land one.
Office politics comes after you land a job so it doesn’t explain why he was so successful at getting multiple offers.
I’ve seen claims on Twitter that he used multiple tactics:
1. Good ol’ cold emails;
2.Using a recruiter for warm intros
3. Applying like everyone else but with a resume that is full of fabrications.
A common thread in many of his victim companies: he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
> Office politics comes after you land a job
You think? I'm extending the term to actually getting a job in "traditional" organizations. You already have to optimize for keywords etc, don't you? It's not human interaction but a "process".
> he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
But they got an "AI" engineer didn't they? Or no one in management could define what an "AI" engineer is?
Tbh I'd give the guy a high paying job, but in marketing.
I wonder if he's spending all the time optimizing for interviews & interviewing than actually working. I guess that's what you get if you make the interview process so terrible that only a full-time interviewer (as opposed to real employee) can pass it.
No surprise, it's all about the cloud driven interview.
Seriously, a good programmer cares about good abstraction, not the correct cloud setup.
Those startups are worth the scam, it's skill issue all the way down.
I would imagine that a lot of the job background check processes can be somewhat fuzzy - it's too much time and too unreliable to try asking actual startups if someone is employed there currently, particularly outside of the US, and it wouldn't even really tell you what you wanted to know if someone is saying they'll leave their current job for you.
(Hell, every so often various companies randomly decide that I and someone with almost the same full name as I are the same person, even without that person ever having had an account with the company, and then it's a pain to straighten it out because they all claim they have no insight into where those black box systems pull this information...yes, I'm really quite sure that I did not have a lease on this kind of car before I was born.)
Doubly so, I imagine, if you're not in the US, depending on whether you're an actual FTE or a contractor or what.
I find it hard to be sympathetic to the companies though, really - given how quickly the organizations that love to use family metaphors and imagery to describe their culture will drop people if it's inconvenient for the company, I don't think they get to cry foul on someone thinking they're entitled to the work as promised and nothing else.
Reminded me of this guy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589
The date on that post says a lot more about the state of hiring in ‘21-22 than overemployment (though 10 is a ridiculous amount). Everyone was over-hiring, ZIRP, etc. Then the music stopped in ‘23 and almost everyone was laid off.
I don’t know him, but I did once have a staff member who was kind of the same. Nothing ever got delivered, their dad, mum, aunty, grandmother was always in hospital. They never came into the office. They always had their camera off. When they did do something, it was brilliant but they only produced stuff when questions were being asked. Other staff would cover for him as sort of an unspoken rule.
> He estimated that he was bringing in $30,000 to $40,000 per month
Doesn't sound like "extremely dire financial circumstances" to me...
Could be a gambling addiction
Maybe we don't need to take the word of a self-proclaimed fraudster at face value.
Yes. People like that are adept at making you feel for them.
He wasn't going for that, otherwise he would be more specific.
This looks like some sort of money sink he's ashamed to admit having. Might be gambling, might be porn. Whatever it is, it's not something he'll garner any compassion for.
He agreed to a YouTube interview with an established channel.
As per his cold emails and interview patter, it is my opinion that he will have considered defence and mitigations arguments to present in the interview.
That's a hell of a gambling addiction when he's making about 10 times what I am. You'd think you'd stop if you were just flushing that money down the toilet and not winning anything from the gambling
Well if you are winning money, you need to keep going as to not waste your lucky streak. If you are losing, you need to double down to win back what you lost. You need to keep going, as long as you do, the loses are not real, you can still turn it around. You need to play one more game. One more. You don't want to face she consequences of your action, you are in too deep. Your life will be ruined. There is no escape. It is to late to stop anyway, might as well keep playing.
Many people don't understand how serious gambling addictions is. It destroys families. I can be as bad as any drug related addiction if not worse.
Though that was just one guess. There are many money sinks. Porn, gacha games and so on.
About twenty years ago there was a story in Melbourne, of a young foreign student at the casino.
He withdrew $1,000 from the ATM from his home back in Asia. Was duly given the cash. He noticed though, that looking at online banking, his balance hadn't changed. Odd, but maybe it was a vagary of international transactions (and again, 20+ years ago).
Nope. So he took out another $1,000. And another. Every time, got the money, no transaction posted.
Not just one ATM, any.
Over the course of 2 years when it all came out, he had gotten $2M+ from this.
Know how he got caught? He took some of that money gambling. And sat at a table all night, constantly replenishing his stash. That tipped off the casino that something was odd, because they had loaded the ATM with $250K, which usually lasted ~48h, but he emptied out in a few. "Didn't we fill this this afternoon?".
Once they got the financial institutions it was also fairly quickly revealed.
And in court, the local banks admitted that there had been nothing flagged in their system, and presumably it would have kept working until (at least) his card expired.
There you have a literal money printing machine, and "No, let's see what I can win gambling". I suppose here's other factors like "Maybe it's easier to launder a big winning" but nonetheless, it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling.
> it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling
Presumably he expected the jig to go up eventually and be asked to return the money; if his gambling was successful he could've returned the money and avoid any trouble, essentially having made his winnings on credit.
How powerful is a casino if "they got the financial institutions"?
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?
This seems to highlight how broken the hiring process is at these companies. I guess this is what you get when you want to leet code your candidates.
Honestly feels like the whole Soham Parekh thing on Twitter is one giant joke with the one sincere / honest remark being the original from @Suhail.
Like, I can't wrap my head around this many people having some kind of experience with a single guy who's claim to be fame is basically gaming the interview process at an incredible amount of Y Combinator startups.
Yeah, I'm surprised someone who's been working at over 50 companies in only 3 years wasn't caught sooner. Some of the stories are wild enough that they had to have been shared with others at the time.
Founders don't like to go around advertising that they got tricked by a scammer. They're trying to impress everyone and raise money. Telling the whole world that you got scammed is not a good look.
Years ago I was hired as an Engineering Manager at a small company, within about the first month on the job I had to have the awkward conversation about firing two of the employees on my team.
See it turned out that the boss worked remote 4-1/2 days of the week, and the employees were in office.
One would show up at 10, take 2 hour lunch around 11.30 and leave around 2.30. He did not work remote. This employee was as always behind on his work.
Second wasn’t even a programmer. He just lied on his resume and got the job over beers and a handshake. He was a graphics designer, he played off a few WordPress template installs as his portfolio.
To keep a story short, the owner spent months doing everything but firing the two employees, demanding I try to teach the designer some computer science and ignored the other scammer. He refused to believe he paid these men 6-figures for years on end. That I must be coming in here to lie and wreck his company, that I left my cushy high-frequency trading job to ruin his startup.
When I asked the sole good engineer on the team what in the hell was going on at this company she simply told me “Oh, the old manager just did all the work for the other two guys since he was their buddy and hired them originally.”
It doesn't have to be the whole world, just their inner circle. If people are that reluctant to admit fault (50 times!), then that's a dismal statement on how often we see truth in society overall.
I wonder... did any of those simultaneous jobs consider him a bad performer?
Did any of those simultaneous jobs even have someone who could evaluate their technical employees based on what they do and not signaling?
What I don't understand is why he updated his public profiles with all those simultaneous jobs..
Yes. He'd commit code once a week or so, and then make excuses on why he couldn't do more. They're fire him after a couple months, and by then, he'd have gotten the money.
My understanding from what I saw on twitter about this yesterday was that a number of the companies that did hire him ended up firing him very quickly soon after, I think
Interviewing is a skill. I think that he got really good at it, both in tailor his CV as well as the process itself. It probably worked on the process and make adjustments. Based on the what I’ve read, it seems that he was interviewing all the time.
So, IMHO, he focused in the interview process over everything else, including understanding and exploiting the blind spots. He iterated and refined it, until, he became a master of it.
He really seemed to be not great at the work itself, though. He was being fired after a couple of days, which I don’t think is common. You really have to do it very badly to be fired so quick after being hired.
This is what happens at top consulting firms. Top 5% interview skills, especially as smoothing your way through a case study. But when they actually come consult for your business, it’s just not what you pay for given what you’ve been led to believe with those case studies.
Related links that have been posted in other threads. Others?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/who-is-soham-parekh-the-se...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/man-goes-viral-working...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWMngMm3_88
How come all the companies that hired him are "X but with AI"? Any several state he "aced" their algo-focused interviews. That's like winning a long drive contest; it doesn't mean you're good at golf.
Would suck to be an honest dude who happens to share the same name right now.
You must understand, these startup founders did extremely well on Raven's Progressive Matrices in grade school.
How has this been #1 Ask HN for about a week, falling to #2 just after a week?
the issue is hiring processes do not verify what is on resume. ppl lie about even their education/degrees and what school they went talk less the company they worked at. Most people know companies do not verify any of those and background checks are usually about real name and criminal records only; they do not check employment history and education history. Hint, start a company that does this and become the next unicorn overnight and help companies verify these right before offer stage. Good luck!!!
It's because in the leftist bay area tech scene, of which ycombinator is the absolute epicenter, no one does bias training. Among leftists, indians are the "model minority" and everyone is looking for an indian golden boy. You have no idea you are even doing it because you have implicit bias you are always crowing about. India is one of the poorest nations on earth and has many smart people, but there is an infatuation among the monied west coast left.
In a way the leftist tech scene has adopted eastern mysticism and shows how far california has moved from westernism. Hindu and Buddhism are religions that worship living humans and believe in divine incarnation. A young person might be a llama in hinduism or a tulku in buddhism. It's not to say that these tech startups are worshiping their newly discovered india programmer, but it is the culture that does not fall far from the tree.
for companies who hired him and let him go, you should be reviewing your interview system. it looks like we are going back to old argument "coders who are good at interviews (most likely leetcode), but terrible at delivering actual work."
the issue is hiring processes do not verify what is on resume. ppl lie about even their education/degrees and what school they went talk less the company they worked at. Most people know companies do not verify any of those and background checks are usually about real name and criminal records only; they do not check employment history and education history.
Hint, start a company that does this and become the next unicorn overnight and help companies verify these right before offer stage. Good luck!!!
did anyone see this? or was this censored?
Looks like he has cracked the hiring playbook. I wouldn't be surprised if Zuck came forward and said they also hired SP for their ASI team.
People like him are going to accelerate the death of remote/hybrid roles
The answer is that startups almost never do any meaningful personnel vetting.
That’s why they also keep hiring North Koreans.
What is the difference between this and leadership being in the committees, boards and executive seats of multiple companies?
Why is it the social expectation that an IC must devote 100% of their time and energy to the operations of a single company, when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?
IME, employees are on committees and boards (though not public company boards all that often) all the time. The issue here taking multiple full time positions. A CEO being the CEO of multiple companies at once is not common, and when it does happen it tends to draw a lot of scrutiny. CEO is considered a full time job, showing up to a board meeting every quarter is not.
The second part of this is disclosure, which was not done in this case.
One particular CEO in the news is at the head of 3 companies
"at the head" of large - especially publicly traded - companies is not the same as trying to run all aspects of the day-to-day. It also rarely (ever?) happens when they don't have a big ownership stake, or are there primarily as a figurehead.
We can debate if the executive timeline is too short and that's what destroys companies, but I don't see how this is the same as an over-employed engineer who's spread too thin.
Many would argue that, indeed, said public CEO is spread too thin.
Incidentally, why aren't there more part time positions?
Probably because said leadership would then be unable to keep their employees in meetings since they're supposed to do some actual work once in a while.
At the C-suite level, I'm noticing more "fractional" positions, which — as far as I can tell — is a fancier way of saying part time. (This may be the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon at work, though.)
> Incidentally, why aren't there more part time positions?
It is obviously easier to manage a small group of people who work full-time than a larger group of people who work part-time. So, if there does not exist a strong wish for part-time positions from the employees, few will be created.
Also, a lot of employees are there "for the money". So getting paid much worse for a part-time position is considered to be the worse deal by many employees.
Maybe there are more than you think? Some companies are willing to do reduced time even if it isn't explicitly listed on the offer.
Go ask wait staff or warehouse workers how much they like their part time jobs.
So why would you deny me the right to hold several part time contracts instead of a full time "job"? I'm not in those industries.
It is not about denying but showcasing that it might not be as beneficial as you somehow believe.
I'm speaking for myself. I like having several part time contracts more than one full time job.
Of course, that only goes for IT if done remotely.
That's no reason to throw seasonal warehouse jobs at me as a counterexample.
because the overhead of a PT or fractional employee is just about as much as a FT one, and why should I give you 100% attention when you only want to give me 50%?
There aren’t formal part time positions but there’s a lot of jobs that only occupy half your full time and don’t ask questions when you disappear for a few hours
The difference is pretty explicit in the terms and conditions? By the way, there are also leadership positions with similar limitations on your ability to take outside roles.
Interesting. So elon's terms and conditions says he's a part-time employee?
>What is the difference between this and leadership being in the committees
That this involved lying to your employers. There is no social expectation that you only work one job, plenty of people work multiple jobs, but there is a social expectation that you do what you said you'd do, and it turns out you have a bit of a mathematical problem if you try to work 4 eight hour jobs in a 24 hour day.
Which is, as per the article, how he was caught. Turns out if you call in sick at one place and then push code to github for your other jobs most employers aren't paying you for that.
Please. Employers are going after the your last drop of blood. The only reason that’s socially accepted is because they have the power to do so, and because it has been like that since ever. You make one mistake and you’re fired (sometimes even you’re fired randomly); the company is not earning as much as last year? Layoffs! AI can do part of your job? Layoffs!
It’s silly and servant-like to think you are in an equal-to-equal position when dealing with a company and that you cannot dedicate your time to other endeavors just because they wrote that in a paper. If it turns out that they don’t like how you perform while doing multiple jobs, they will fire you, just like they will fire you even if you work just for them.
Employment contract is a contract and usually it's fixed hours per workday for a salary. So basically you as employee swap X hours per Y amount of money.
If one of the parties is in breach of that contract it's normal it to be dissolved. If you don't want to work, you don't need to sign that contract.
The really moral part of free market economy is that both parties are voluntary entering a contract. You as a person sell your skilled time, the company buys your skilled time. If you have super unique skills, like Andrej Karpathy you sell something on the market that is very valuable and you have the upper hand. If you know "Microsoft Excel" I'd bet there are many people (or AI agents) that will do the same and what you're selling can be bought in many places (and time zones).
Basic microeconomics... In a free market you need to do something for the others to have something for you. And if it's not useful, they won't pay you for that.
Salaried positions are explicitly not selling time. Whether I work 2 or 12 hours the compensation is the same. The only reason these contracts make sense is the unstated agreement that my employer won’t abuse the contractual power they theoretically have. And what’s the alternative? Signing bad contracts and leaving when things go to shit is probably 10x better for my career than pretending that I have agency in contract negotiations
All the jobs I had in was contractually required to work from X to Y at a place Z. So my experience is that is indeed a selling skilled time.
The ones you describe where there is a contract for output, usually with external contractors not full-time employees.
And you indeed have agency, especially if you provide something hard to find or you're the sole provider for this company of that service and the switching cost is high. Basic microeconomics...
I'm in an equal to equal position to not sign any contract I don't like. What is it with this whiny attitude in this industry? We're talking specifically about software engineers. The guy worked four six figure jobs raking in 40 grand a month and didn't show up to work. Can we stop pretending we're oppressed workers because we have to show up from 9-5, Jesus.
In my experience I have no leverage and the contract is too vague to mean anything. The contract I signed says my job conditions and work hours are subject to change at any time. I understand I took a risk, but things were fine for years before they wanted me to start being available 24/7 or work late into the night. In environments like this the only sane thing to do is reluctantly accept the terms of the contract and push as many boundaries as I can.
Just because the employer pays me and I signed a contract doesn’t mean I can’t complain or push back. Do you think I should also dance like a Walmart employee in the morning if my employer tells me to? The contract I signed says yes but in reality it doesn’t matter
You've answer your own question. If you are hired to work full-time you are expected to do that (as per your contract). If you are on a board or committee the expectation is a number of hours per month.
But fulltime is a contract thing (at least here) and defined by 40 hrs a week. In my country 32-36 in contracts is also called fulltime. So after those hours, I did my fulltime and now you do not own me until the next 40 hours. Unless working for competitors currently here you cannot make valid contracts to prevent it either.
However, if you are in the EU, then all your employers are jointly responsible for ensuring that your collective working hours don't breach the Working Time Directive, which means 48 hours as the maximum average working week, calculated over a 4-month period, across all employers (excluding certain statutory roles like seamen, law enforcement, and military).
There are contractual terms, including things that are likely to be conflict of interests or impact performance. And depending on jurisdiction there are also laws on working hours: 48 hours max. per week on average in the UK and EU across all jobs (it is possible to opt out) and with minimum rest times. Because employers can be held liable, if they find out they won't let you.
The comment I was replying to does not make sense.
> when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview?
This is extremely rare; generally a CxO is a full-time job. Elon Musk is a notable exception, and, ah, it doesn't seem to be going _great_. Being a _board_ member isn't usually a significant time commitment.
when their senior leadership often manages their time between the affairs of many companies in their purview
It is kind of tiring for me to read people equating "Elon Musk" with "all those rich guys being CEOs".
When you really are a business owner OFTEN you have to devote 120% of your time and energy for running the company and single one.
People you see on TV flying private jets to expensive holiday destinations are not your average business owners. Elon and the likes are the exception not the norm.
Musk isn’t even the first person I thought of here (it was Jack Dorsey).
He is not in their social class. The rules for the peasants don't apply to the lords.
To anyone thinking this is the only hustle out there or this is uncommon, you've no idea what's really out there!
Sounds like you're really bad at hiring. Paying low wages is backfiring at you
Wouldn’t this be largely corrected by reference checks/letters in hiring? I’ve seen those becoming more frequent.
The moral of the story is that the current interviewing process is easy to cheat for people like him.
Rather, since by basic economy markets are controlled by incentives:
He is the kind of person that companies actually want. (Otherwise these companies would have set up a different interviewing process (i.e. different incentives)).
:-)
this reminds me of dating apps
instead of all the women chasing the same guy
its all the companies chasing the same dev
soham is a chad
has hiring turned into tinder?
The technologies aren't that groundbreaking after all. Resources on both side of supply and demand remain the same. There was no paradigm shit, no miraculous influx of extraordinary candidates. It's the illusion of choice creating the standoff. You have to lie and cheat to be considered a choice.
All anecdotes I see about this dude is: "we hired him and he did a fantastic job, but once we found out he had multiple employment we fired him".
... why? If the guy's doing well by all metrics and not leaking IP, literally, who cares?
This shouldn't come as a revelation, but it's risky to employ people of low character. There's the risk of theft, lawsuits, etc – not to mention, nobody needs the frustration of dealing with lies and flakiness.
Then fire the CEOs, lawyers, investors, and top management with low character.
I suppose, in that case, it's risky to employ people of lower character than the people managing them.
He's not going to get much sympathy. Because:
1) from the employer side, this runs afoul of all MBA theory and practice, so he could have been more profits. Almost by definition, this means you're not getting the maximum out of the guy. Oh and there's jealousy of course.
2) from employee's side, this runs afoul of union thinking. Those jobs could have employed 5 people, maybe more. Oh and there's jealousy of course.
I saw several anecdotes that were: “when he did the job, it was great, but he rarely did the job because there was always someone sick, meeting with a lawyer, or any excuse to not deliver”.
So I think that finding about multiple employment is actually about realizing he was lying the whole time with the excuses.
We had a guy like that... the thing is you cannot really pass any responsibility on him because he will eventually be distracted with other stuff. You will never know when you have him 100%. You don't want to keep checking on your employees week by week day by day, if they deliver.
You need some degree of trust in your employees (you cannot "verify" all the time), and you cannot trust some guy you KNOW is cheating on you.
None of the anecdotes I saw say that.
All of them say he did good work when he was working, but it was obvious that he was trying to do it as a part-time job.
Wrong. Many anecdotes say, "He was scamming us in the first week."
What I find disturbing here is the number of people who are supporting him saying that he is a victim of the system.
Irrespective of his skills or how broken the system is, dishonesty can never be condoned.
Lots of YC companies copy each other process and selection criteria. Basically- they all have the same blind spots and look for the same type of engineer.
So, super easy to scam all of them with the same skillset and mannerism.
This guy, and guys like him, are the reason why it's such a pain to do legit business in the modern world.
Try getting a code signing certificate, opening a bank account for a new business or listing an app on the App Store. You'll quickly see the effects of this kind of behavior.
This guy should be absolutely ostracized.
[Edit: not to mention the countless brilliant Indian software devs for whom he just directly put Silicon Valley out of reach.]
Ostracized? I don’t know. If the companies he works for are happy enough with his output, then what’s wrong? What’s silly is that we have to work for 40 years to afford a living place that can hardly accommodate you and your family. What’s silly is that you have executives earning 5 times what you earn jumping from company to company and doing nothing but maximizing their own profits. So, yeah, fuck companies. He guy is playing the game the best he can, and if any company doesn’t like his output they can just fire him.
They did!
>This guy should be absolutely ostracized.
But it's funny. And people who make you laugh, even if naughty, get a pass.
Except this is exactly the same thing that businesses constantly do to their employees and customers.
People underestimate how widespread this actually is.
Because why would you expect startup hiring process to be good?
Bigger question is do you think he really wants everyone on the Internet targeting him one way or another?
Why didn't he get the option to remain an anonymous scandal?
We don't need to know his name to discuss his actions.
The purpose of sharing his name was to warn other companies, not to discuss the story.
That’s an excuse for poor behavior.
Relevant people can share it privately and put out a public warning about obviously noticeable behavioral patterns.
Couple issues here:
1) Sharing it wide open on the Web for the whole world to see and everyone to poke fun of is a massive intrusion.
2) It's also a gateway to bunch of nonsense and false information all over the Internet. Half the stuff I see about this person under allegations, I just don't trust. Not to mention all of a sudden there are tens of impersonators.
3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
All this is happening too close to people openly talking about what AI researchers are being traded on every social media platform. Idk if any of these people ever wanted to be so famous.
> 1) Sharing it wide open on the Web for the whole world to see and everyone to poke fun of is a massive intrusion.
If this person had done a single violation I'd agree. He's a serial manipulator, though, and he's been scamming people throughout the startup community. Once your behavior starts becoming a problem for a community, you shouldn't expect that community to also protect your identity.
The person was targeting a startup community (YC) and had learned how to game their system. The person posting the info didn't even post it immediately. They posted it a year later after hearing multiple stories of the person continuing to do it.
> 3) There are many people with the same name who’s going to get a backlash FYI.
There's a photo of him right in the thread specifically so people can determine if they're talking about the same person. He was also highlighted on a Meta open source developer blog a few years ago.
We all know people can have similar names.
That’s great I don’t trust anything that’s said about him because it’s publicized.
I’m not even sure if this guy is real or a made up story to poke fun at YC community.
Either way, I’m not losing sleep over it.
Just letting all of you know that someone’s always watching
It just shows how most startups don't have a good vetting system in place.
Leetcode interviews are a faang thing
Soham is ultimate scamster. What can you expect from people who are resource starved for centuries.
The real question is why did so many YC founder fell for his tricks? He is not even the US and he claimed he is coming over to so many companies?
All these people saying we hired him and he was good. No, he wasn't.
If he could scam about location and lie about so many thing, what makes you think he did not cheat during interviews?
He likely used cluely or some shit software like that to cheat.
A scam through and through.
https://thesohamparekh.com/
/s
TLDR: Tech has cargo-culted the interview process and people are gaming the system based on that interview process.
TLDR: Low wages are backfiring