Latest news with #softwareengineer
The Verge
5 days ago
- Business
- The Verge
Meet Soham Parekh, the engineer burning through tech by working at three to four startups simultaneously
One name is popping up a lot across tech startup social media right now, and you might've heard it: Soham Parekh. On X, people are joking that Parekh is single-handedly holding up all modern digital infrastructure, while others are posting memes about him working in front of a dozen different monitors or filling in for the thousands of people that Microsoft just laid off. From what social media posts suggest, Parekh is actually a software engineer who seems to have interviewed at dozens of tech startups over the years, while also juggling multiple jobs at the same time. Several startups had this revelation on July 2nd, when Suhail Doshi, founder of the AI design tool Playground, posted a PSA on X, saying: PSA: there's a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He's been preying on YC companies and more. Beware. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn't stopped a year later. No more excuses. Doshi's post was quickly flooded with replies that included similar stories. 'We interviewed this guy too, but caught this during references checks,' Variant founder Ben South said. 'Turns out he had 5-6 profiles each with 5+ places he actually worked at.' When asked what tipped him off about Parekh, South told The Verge that his suspicions arose during Parekh's interview, prompting his team to do a reference check earlier than they usually would. 'That's when we learned he was working multiple jobs,' South said. Parekh's resume and pitch email look good at first glance, which helps him garner interest from multiple companies. 'He had a prolific GitHub contribution graph and prior startup experience,' Marcus Lowe, founder of the AI app builder Create, told The Verge. 'He was also extremely technically strong during our interview process.' Just one day after this all unfolded, Parekh came forward in an interview with the daily tech show TBPN. Parekh confirmed what many tech startup founders had suspected: he had been working for multiple companies at the same time. 'I'm not proud of what I've done. That's not something I endorse either. But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity,' Parekh said. 'I was in extremely dire financial circumstances.' Parekh seems to have made a good first impression on many people. Digger CEO Igor Zalutski said his company 'nearly hired him,' as he 'seemed so sharp' during interviews, while cofounder Justin Harvey similarly said that he was 'THIS close to hiring him,' adding that 'he actually crushed the interview.' Vapi cofounder Jordan Dearsley said Parekh 'was the best technical interview' he's seen, but he 'did not deliver on his projects.' The startups that did hire Parekh didn't seem to keep him around for long. Lowe said that he noticed something was off when Parekh kept making excuses to push back his start date. After telling Lowe that he had to delay working because he had a trip planned to see his sister in New York, Parekh later claimed that he couldn't start working following the trip because he was sick. 'For whatever reason, something just felt off,' Lowe said. That's when Lowe visited Parekh's GitHub profile and realized he was committing code to a private repository during the time he was supposed to be sick. Lowe also found recent commits to another San Francisco-based startup. 'Did some digging, noticed that he was in some of their marketing materials,' Lowe said. 'I was like, 'Huh, but he didn't declare this on his resume. This feels weird.'' Create ended up letting Parekh go after he failed to complete an assignment. It looks like Parekh even had a stint at Meta. In 2021, the company published a post highlighting his story as a contributor working on mixed-reality experiences in WebXR. In the post, Parekh said that he found 'that the best way to get better at software development is to not only practice it but to use it to solve real world problems.' Meta didn't immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment. Parekh's purported scheme may have been uncovered, but his outlook might not be all bad — if you believe him. Parekh claims he landed a job at Darwin, an AI video remixing startup. 'Earlier today, I signed an exclusive founding deal to be founding engineer at one company and one company only,' Parekh posted on X. 'They were the only ones willing to bet on me at this time.'
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Earning More Than $100,000 Feels Like A Dream To Many. But When You Look Closer, Some Of These Jobs Aren't As Difficult As You'd Think
For anyone stuck in a low-paying, high-stress job, making six figures might sound like the ultimate goal. A recent Reddit post asked a simple question: 'To those of you making $100K+ per year, how hard is your job, really?' The answers surprised a lot of people. While some six-figure earners put in long hours or deal with intense pressure, many say their work is surprisingly manageable. 'I am making $205K this year and I'm stoned most of the time while doing my job,' one person said about their remote public relations role in New York. 'My job is easy to me, but maybe not to other people.' Don't Miss: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Peter Thiel turned $1,700 into $5 billion—now accredited investors are eyeing this software company with similar breakout potential. Learn how you can A software engineer making $450,000 admitted, 'I work about 40 hours a week, just like most other jobs. My job would be very hard for engineers with less experience in my domain,' but for him, 'things feel pretty straightforward.' Another added, 'I work about 15 hours a week running email campaigns in my boxers [for $110,000]. Could easily be making $150-200K, but the work/life balance is invaluable.' Many said their jobs only feel easy because of the years of work they put in earlier. One person summed it up like this: 'The job isn't hard. What was hard was getting here.' Some roles, like development, security, and operations, or DevSecOps, come with real responsibility. 'I make 225k base with 30-70k bonus. The pressure is real... infrastructure being the backbone of everything,' one worker said. But even in those demanding fields, the payoff can be worth it: 'I wouldn't trade it. I've reached a point where the pay is good, the work is meaningful, and I have enough autonomy.' Trending: Invest early in CancerVax's breakthrough tech aiming to disrupt a $231B market. There's a big difference between physical labor and mentally demanding work. A registered nurse making around $120,000 said, 'It's more so mentally tough having to take care of the more difficult patients.' Dealing with families was one of the top complaints among nurses. Others echoed that not all 'hard' jobs feel the same. 'Jobs aren't paid by how hard they are,' one commenter wrote. 'You're paid based on how easily replaceable your skill set is and how much value the position creates.' Sales and tech roles were common among high earners, often with flexible hours and big bonuses. 'When it's great, it feels like I am cheating in life,' said one tech salesperson. 'When it's bad, I regret all my life decisions. In sales, you don't just make 'less,' you get fired.' Another person in the same field making about $300,000 a year said, 'As long as I get my sh*t done, my manager doesn't care what I do. I take off early to golf a lot, wake up 30 minutes before my meetings, and can take my calls from anywhere in the world.'Not everyone in the thread had it easy. Military officers, air traffic controllers, and clinical nurse managers described heavy stress and long hours. 'Work/life balance is terrible,' one officer wrote. 'I heavily dislike it but I have a family to feed and the retirement is literally the best there is. 40 hours a week isn't even close enough to cover all the sh*t that I need to do, on top of all the things I'm expected to do outside of work—physical training, master's degree, military education.' The responses made one thing obvious: pay and difficulty aren't always connected. A job might be stressful, but not hard. Or it might be chill, but it took years of hustle to get to that point. As one person put it: 'You aren't paying someone to push the buttons so much as you are paying them to know what button to push.' Read Next: UNLOCKED: 5 NEW TRADES EVERY WEEK. Click now to get top trade ideas daily, plus unlimited access to cutting-edge tools and strategies to gain an edge in the markets. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Earning More Than $100,000 Feels Like A Dream To Many. But When You Look Closer, Some Of These Jobs Aren't As Difficult As You'd Think originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Earning More Than $100,000 Feels Like A Dream To Many. But When You Look Closer, Some Of These Jobs Aren't As Difficult As You'd Think
For anyone stuck in a low-paying, high-stress job, making six figures might sound like the ultimate goal. A recent Reddit post asked a simple question: 'To those of you making $100K+ per year, how hard is your job, really?' The answers surprised a lot of people. While some six-figure earners put in long hours or deal with intense pressure, many say their work is surprisingly manageable. 'I am making $205K this year and I'm stoned most of the time while doing my job,' one person said about their remote public relations role in New York. 'My job is easy to me, but maybe not to other people.' Don't Miss: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Peter Thiel turned $1,700 into $5 billion—now accredited investors are eyeing this software company with similar breakout potential. Learn how you can A software engineer making $450,000 admitted, 'I work about 40 hours a week, just like most other jobs. My job would be very hard for engineers with less experience in my domain,' but for him, 'things feel pretty straightforward.' Another added, 'I work about 15 hours a week running email campaigns in my boxers [for $110,000]. Could easily be making $150-200K, but the work/life balance is invaluable.' Many said their jobs only feel easy because of the years of work they put in earlier. One person summed it up like this: 'The job isn't hard. What was hard was getting here.' Some roles, like development, security, and operations, or DevSecOps, come with real responsibility. 'I make 225k base with 30-70k bonus. The pressure is real... infrastructure being the backbone of everything,' one worker said. But even in those demanding fields, the payoff can be worth it: 'I wouldn't trade it. I've reached a point where the pay is good, the work is meaningful, and I have enough autonomy.' Trending: Invest early in CancerVax's breakthrough tech aiming to disrupt a $231B market. There's a big difference between physical labor and mentally demanding work. A registered nurse making around $120,000 said, 'It's more so mentally tough having to take care of the more difficult patients.' Dealing with families was one of the top complaints among nurses. Others echoed that not all 'hard' jobs feel the same. 'Jobs aren't paid by how hard they are,' one commenter wrote. 'You're paid based on how easily replaceable your skill set is and how much value the position creates.' Sales and tech roles were common among high earners, often with flexible hours and big bonuses. 'When it's great, it feels like I am cheating in life,' said one tech salesperson. 'When it's bad, I regret all my life decisions. In sales, you don't just make 'less,' you get fired.' Another person in the same field making about $300,000 a year said, 'As long as I get my sh*t done, my manager doesn't care what I do. I take off early to golf a lot, wake up 30 minutes before my meetings, and can take my calls from anywhere in the world.'Not everyone in the thread had it easy. Military officers, air traffic controllers, and clinical nurse managers described heavy stress and long hours. 'Work/life balance is terrible,' one officer wrote. 'I heavily dislike it but I have a family to feed and the retirement is literally the best there is. 40 hours a week isn't even close enough to cover all the sh*t that I need to do, on top of all the things I'm expected to do outside of work—physical training, master's degree, military education.' The responses made one thing obvious: pay and difficulty aren't always connected. A job might be stressful, but not hard. Or it might be chill, but it took years of hustle to get to that point. As one person put it: 'You aren't paying someone to push the buttons so much as you are paying them to know what button to push.' Read Next: UNLOCKED: 5 NEW TRADES EVERY WEEK. Click now to get top trade ideas daily, plus unlimited access to cutting-edge tools and strategies to gain an edge in the markets. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Earning More Than $100,000 Feels Like A Dream To Many. But When You Look Closer, Some Of These Jobs Aren't As Difficult As You'd Think originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
The Verge
17-06-2025
- The Verge
Threads is adding fediverse content to your social feeds
The Threads team at Meta has spent the past year working on supporting the broader fediverse and social web, and is launching its biggest integrations yet: a new dedicated feed for fediverse posts, and a way to search for fediverse users inside of Threads. Starting today, if you've turned on fediverse sharing in Threads, there will be a new section at the top of your Following feed that takes you to a list of posts from folks you follow on Mastodon, Flipboard, or wherever else you've connected your Threads account. It's very much a separate feed, which Meta software engineer Peter Cottle tells me is deliberate. 'For everything from integrity to user impersonation, just for user understanding, it's nice to have it as kind of a separate thing.' The fediverse feed isn't algorithmically ranked, or subject to any of Threads' rules or moderation; it's just a reverse-chronological feed of stuff you follow. Over time, Cottle says, Meta could mix the posts more, but he's not sure that's the right idea. 'There's actually kind of a different use case for fediverse consumption,' he says, that's more like old-school RSS readers. 'I might want to subscribe to Ghost publications, or subscribe to different authors, so I have this dedicated place to catch up on my across-the-web content, separately from a Following feed or a For You feed.' Even internally at Meta, he says, there's some debate about whether Threads wants to be a fully open social network or should just act as a repository for all that external content. When you set up fediverse sharing, Threads automatically connects to whatever accounts you've followed, but you can also now search for users on Mastodon and elsewhere from the Threads search bar. If you follow them, you'll start to see their posts in Threads too. This kind of easy discovery has long been one of the biggest challenges for Mastodon in particular, since people are distributed across so many separate servers, but Cottle says Threads can do something like universal fediverse search. This is certainly the most visible fediverse content has ever been inside of Threads, but the world of ActivityPub is still not a first-class citizen inside of Threads. You still have to opt-in to sharing your posts, you still have to have a separate account to connect to, and you'll still have to go to the dedicated feed to see what's new. (If you post something and get fediverse replies, those are still separate too.) Cottle argues that this separation is a useful way to understand different perspectives. But it seems clear there's just still a lot of work to be done both on bringing content into the platform and on showing it to users in a way that makes sense. In general, Cottle says, there's still a lot of work to be done educating people on how the fediverse works, and even what it is in the first place. That's why Meta has been a bit slower in rolling out fediverse features, even as the Threads team has more aggressively shipped things like DMs, spoiler alerts, and links in bio. But Cottle says the team is still committed to bringing Threads and the fediverse together — whatever that ends up looking like.
The Independent
05-06-2025
- General
- The Independent
Jordan Johnson-Doyle: Body found in search for British backpacker who went missing in Malaysia
A British backpacker who was missing for over a week has been found dead at the bottom of a lift shaft in Malaysia, police have said. Jordan Johnson-Doyle, 25, vanished after last being seen at a bar in Kuala Lumpur on 27 May. Kuala Lumpur police chief Commissioner Datuk Rusdi Mohd Isa said that his body was identified by a relative based on a body tattoo, according to local news website FMT. The software engineer, from Southport, had spent the past 18 months travelling around across Asia while working remotely for a US company, his mum said. His mother, Leanne Burnett, told the Liverpool Echo that her son's last known location was Healy Mac's Irish Bar in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. He is believed to have then visited a nearby bar called The Social. She alerted authorities last Friday because she hadn't heard from him in three days. An appeal on social media read: "My son is missing in Kuala Lumpur. "Please help us find him, all his family and friends are so worried. Please please share share share." This week his family flew out to Malaysia to help local officials with the search. But his body was found in a construction site lift shaft in Bangsar, a suburb of the Malaysian capital, on Wednesday, authorities said. A post mortem found the cause of death was a chest injury due to a fall from height. Kuala Lumpur police said they are not treating the death as suspicious. The police chief said in a statement to MalaysiaToday: 'It is hereby confirmed that the body found is that of Jordan Johnson-Doyle who was reported missing on 2 June. 'The cause of death is that of chest injury due to fall from height following an autopsy conducted earlier. 'No criminal elements were found at the scene. The case is classified as a sudden death report.' An FCDO spokesperson said: "We are supporting the family of a British man who died in Malaysia and are in contact with the local authorities.' The family previously spoke of their agony during the search. Ms Burnett told the Liverpool Echo: 'I have been been feeling just sick, numb. I just want to get over there, find him and bring him home. 'I want him to know we're looking for him and we're coming to get him.'
