How one developer outsmarted dozens of startups—and what it says about work today

Mint

a day ago

Soham Parekh wasn't hiding.
He used his real name. Showed up on calls. Wrote some code. Then vanished—only to surface again at another startup, mid-sprint, fully onboarded. By the time each team realised something was off—missed meetings, odd excuses, clashing updates—he was already clocking hours elsewhere.
No fake profiles. No aliases. Just a clean trail of GitHub commits and Slack intros. Soham wasn't gaming the system. He simply walked through it.
And he did it over and over again.
***
Parekh, a full-stack developer, became an open secret in founder circles this month. Hacker News threads, Slack screenshots, Twitter jokes, Reddit rants—all echoed the same disbelief: 'Wait, we hired him too?"
One YC-backed startup claimed he worked with them nearly a year. Others noticed earlier, spotting odd overlaps in his LinkedIn timeline. One founder even recalled Soham attending a trial day in person—only to leave halfway through, saying he had to meet a lawyer.
But Parekh didn't disappear. He kept showing up. Just somewhere else.
'So this whole time, AI wasn't taking jobs. Soham was."
— @ArthurMacwaters
The rise of the overemployed
Parekh is not the first engineer to work multiple jobs in parallel. In November 2022, Vanity Fair published a piece titled Overemployed in Silicon Valley: How Scores of Tech Workers Are Secretly Juggling Multiple Jobs.
It told of engineers quietly holding down two, three, even four full-time roles. Some used mouse-jigglers to fake activity. Others ran multiple laptops. One admitted to outsourcing work to Fiverr, an online marketplace for freelance services. A few worked in coordinated Discord communities, sharing tactics.
'I'm not sure if they even know I'm here anymore," one engineer told the reporter. 'All my paychecks are still coming in."
At the time, it read like a side effect of the remote-work boom. A strange consequence of too many laptops and not enough oversight. Some employees simply treated employment like a short-term asset. If no one was watching, why stay loyal?
Parekh didn't need any of that infrastructure. He used his real name. Real resume. Showed up on video calls. Wrote code. Left a trail. He just moved through the system cleanly.
'He crushed our interviews. Worked for us almost a year. Solid job. We only let him go when we found out he was working multiple jobs."
— commenter 'dazzeloid', Hacker News
***
What his story shows is how little it takes to get hired—and stay hired.
One startup said he 'crushed the interviews." Another called him 'top 0.1%." Founders praised his GitHub, his side projects, his email follow-ups. The problem, they said, began only when the job did. That gap—between performance in a vetting process and actual engagement—isn't incidental. It's structural.
Startups, especially ones chasing growth, have narrowed hiring into structured calls and take-home tasks. Processes are recycled across founder networks. Culture fit becomes a checkbox. Most of the time, it comes down to gut feel. Which is just another way of saying: we don't really know.
In that kind of system, someone who interviews well and ships enough can coast for months. If that person is also working three other jobs, the signs fade gradually. By the time someone notices, it's already awkward to ask.
As one Hacker News commenter put it: 'Lots of YC companies copy each other's hiring process. Same blind spots. Same playbook. Easy to scam with the same persona."
The AI comparison isn't a joke
There's another wrinkle. Soham may not have been doing anything that couldn't be done today by an AI agent.
More than one founder joked—what if he was a bot? It's a joke that lands dangerously close to reality.
AI agents today can write code, respond to support tickets, and mimic Slack chatter. The boundary between human contributor and AI script is already thinning.
And if you can't tell whether you're working with a disengaged employee or a competent script—what exactly are you hiring?
***
We've seen this fragility before.
Back in 2022, Wipro fired 300 employees for moonlighting. Chairman Rishad Premji called it 'cheating—plain and simple." The public backlash, however, told a different story. Critics pointed out hypocrisy—executives sit on multiple boards, consultants juggle clients, why not engineers?
The Soham episode surfaces the same tension.
It's not just about overemployment. It's about trust, and the changing texture of work. Who gets to be considered present? What does loyalty mean in a system built on churn?
Parekh is a consequence of that mismatch. He's not a rogue actor. He's the product of a hiring culture that values performance over presence, delivery over connection. A culture that claims to build teams but rarely asks who's actually part of them.
***
So what happens when the next Soham is indistinguishable from an AI agent?
Srikanth Nadhamuni, the former CTO of Aadhaar, believes we'll need to rethink identity itself. In a recent paper, he proposed Personhood Credentials—a cryptographic and biometric framework to prove that a person behind a digital interaction is real, unique, and singular.
The concept sounds abstract, even dystopian. But Nadhamuni argues that in a world of deepfakes and synthetic voice agents, systems like Aadhaar—originally built for public verification—could help anchor digital interactions to actual humans. He describes it as a privacy-preserving firewall against the collapse of trust online.
Startups often claim to be 'people-first." But what happens when you can't even confirm there's a person?
The Soham Parekh story isn't about scamming startups. It's about the gap between how we hire and how we work. A system optimised for speed and scale, not relationship or accountability.
He didn't crack the system. He revealed it was already broken.
Pankaj Mishra is a journalist and co-founder of FactorDaily.
Read more stories by the author:
AI didn't take the job. It changed what the job is.
Factory floors reimagined: How Quess is putting AI agents to work
AI saved a boy from leukaemia in rural Maharashtra—before it was too late
India's unicorn obsession has a human cost