F2F #44: Who is Soham Parekh?

Been hearing a lot of noise about people in the US tech scene holding 3–4 full-time remote jobs at once, without the companies knowing. The latest case, that of Soham Parekh.

Who is Soham Parekh?

Soham Parekh is an Indian software engineer who has become the center of the latest major controversy in the global tech community after being accused of simultaneously working at multiple US startups without disclosing this to his employers, a practice known as moonlighting. The allegations, first made public by Suhail Doshi (founder of Playground AI and former CEO of Mixpanel), claim that Parekh held positions at three to five startups at the same time, many of them Y Combinator-backed companies.

Seems like Y Combinator companies not only indulge in round-tripping revenue:

They now also inflate their headcount with fake engineers!

Of course, a lot of people are now blaming remote work instead of admitting that they have completely flawed hiring and people operations departments. Universe-brained people repeating this over and over: "if you can't see your employees, how do you know they're working?".

Let’s be honest: the real issue is no one gives a fuck about what their team actually does.

Ownership dillutes as companies hit scale. The founders have got 100% ownership, the first 10 hires have got ownership, the next 50 a bit less... until you hire so many people that they don't know you and you don't know them. There can't be ownership there.

This happens when you scale lightning fast. Big VC rounds force companies to hit the gas and hire like there's no tomorrow. For example, when King opened an office in Barcelona, they were hiring 11 people a week, flying people from New freaking Zealand just for an interview. You simply cannot do things right at that speed, and they understand there's an implicit error threshold in doing so that they assume as a company.

Lo and behold, Microsoft just announced the massive layoff of 9000 employees. I'm suprised this isn't called downscaling. Scaling works both days: up and down. But we'll leave this for another day.

Back to topic.

If someone can quietly hold multiple jobs and no one notices for months, that says more about the company than the person. There are a lot of ways to prevent and amend situations like this one, but VC-backend companies are too busy hiring the next person and trying to figure out how to make money to care about their people. That's why they water them with endless perks. It's like the absent father who buys his children new toys every week to compensate for not being there.

This Sokham situation just reveals the crooked state of the industry, where companies experience this every day:

• Overhiring.
• Undefined roles.
• No ownership.
• No accountability.
• Managers with 12 reports but no idea what any of them are doing.

This is what happens when you hire “just in case” instead of “because we need this done”.

You can't know your employees if you hire 50 people per week. Or if you switch their roles and priorities back and forth because you're pivoting every week. Or if you have over 25% employee turnover. Or if you don't talk to them enough.

Know your team.