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👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
The 10x “overlemployed” engineer
A software engineer worked at several AI startups at the same time, without his employers knowing anything about it. Then one frustrated founder who hired him went public…
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The 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can stars Leonardo Di Caprio as a talented 19-year-old fraudster, who forges millions of dollars in checks while pretending to be a doctor, a lawyer, and even an airline pilot. That Hollywood film now has echoes in the tech industry, in a story which has come to light in Silicon Valley.
A software engineer in their mid-twenties, based in India, successfully scammed approximately a million dollars annually from tech startups by excelling in interviews, getting hired remotely, and then not doing their assigned work, all while being simultaneously employed by many companies.
As in ‘Catch Me if You Can’, in this story there’s an unusually talented main character who gets into a dramatic showdown once exposed.
Today’s issue covers what happened, and some learnings from this highly unusual incident:
Exposé. An engineer named Soham Parekh is accused on social media of working at multiple Y Combinator startups at the same time by one employer, and other workplaces come forward.
18 companies that hired, or nearly hired this engineer. Almost all are recently-founded AI startups.
Excuses, excuses… This engineer was hard to contact, and had bizarre reasons as to why.
Skyrocketing demand for AI engineers. One thing is clear: demand for AI engineers is through the roof, and capable software engineers who can integrate LLMs are in high demand.
How did a dev outside the US get hired by hot Silicon Valley startups? False US work authorization status, Silicon Valley startups desperate to hire, and “business-minded 10x engineers” being in high demand, all helped.
Spotting “overemployed” software engineers. Suspicion of ‘overly green’ GitHub profiles, the importance of background checks, and recruitment advice from an ex-Facebook and ex-Uber founder of scaleup hiring business, Dynosaur Labs. Additionally, Digger founder Igor Zalutski confirms that Soham was genuinely among the top 0.1% of software engineers, in terms of both technical skills and business acumen.
What does it mean for remote work? Remote work makes being “overemployed” much easier – and AI tooling will make it even more so. Are more in-person interviews and hybrid work patterns a solution?
The bottom of this article could be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article uninterrupted, online.
1. Exposé
Yesterday (2 July), startup founder Suhail Doshi made an accusation: that a software engineer named Soham Parekh was working at several Y Combinator startups at once, and had been doing so for over a year, all while failing to do the work he was hired to do:
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Initially, the post got a bit of pushback. After all, in California – where most startups which hired Parekh are based – it’s not forbidden to have a second job (aka ‘moonlighting’), as long as it doesn’t overlap with other commitments. Indeed, many leaders founded startups on the side of their main job, and an employer cannot claim intellectual property ownership of a new project which is fully separate from someone’s primary job.
What makes this story stand out is the unusually high number of parallel jobs this one dev took on. All together, the combined workload of all these roles was evidently impossible to maintain, and would inevitably lead to questions being asked by individual employers, who wondered why a clearly-talented engineer was unable to deliver their work.
Suhail said his issue was not that Parekh had a side job; it was something more fundamental:
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Initially, the post got a bit of pushback. After all, in California – where most startups which hired Parekh are based – it’s not forbidden to have a second job (aka ‘moonlighting’), as long as it doesn’t overlap with other commitments. Indeed, many leaders founded startups on the side of their main job, and an employer cannot claim intellectual property ownership of a new project which is fully separate from someone’s primary job.
What makes this story stand out is the unusually high number of parallel jobs this one dev took on. All together, the combined workload of all these roles was evidently impossible to maintain, and would inevitably lead to questions being asked by individual employers, who wondered why a clearly-talented engineer was unable to deliver their work.
Suhail said his issue was not that Parekh had a side job; it was something more fundamental:
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Following Suhail’s post, r