Software engineer goes viral for working at multiple startups at once

In the years following the start of the COVID pandemic, the concept of antiwork grew in popularity — but so did the opposite, "overemployment." As of this publication, the r/overemployed subreddit has nearly 450,000 members, and this week its Redditors are celebrating one person in particular: Soham Parekh.

Parekh is a software engineer in India who went viral on Reddit and X for working at multiple startup companies at once (which is the concept of overemployment: having multiple full-time jobs with hopefully no one noticing). Suhail Doshi, founder of Playground AI and other companies, first broke the news on X. He posted, "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," the post continued. "He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses."

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Other people in the tech industry posted their stories of interacting with and sometimes hiring and firing Parekh.

Matthew Parkhurst, cofounder and CEO of startup Antimetal, quoted Doshi's post and said, "Funnily enough, Soham was our first engineering hire in 2022...Really smart and likable; enjoyed working with him...We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and let him go."

Arkadiy Telegin, cofounder of Leaping AI, posted a photo with Parekh and said, "I also tried giving him [the] benefit of the doubt. He was denying it till the very end. Funnily enough me and his other 'employer' [Fuse AI] did a photo together when we found out. Never ended up sending it to him sadly."

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Even more people in the quotes shared screenshots of email exchanges with Parekh and calendar events for interviews.

In an interview with Technology Business Programming Network, Parekh said it's true that he worked at multiple companies at once. He said he's not proud of what he's done, but "out of necessity" due to his "dire" financial circumstances (though he didn't go into detail), he claimed to work 140 hours a week. (That is 20 hours a day. He also said he's notorious among his friends for not sleeping.)

Parekh also said he's written "every inch" of the code he built, not relying on junior engineers and only using AI "to assist" him.

The situation has opened a conversation about the interviewing process at these tech companies as well as whether it's actually wrong to "moonlight" at multiple companies.

And, of course, this being social media, it also spurred a lot of meme reactions:

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