The ‘Sohamgate’ has highlighted the recruitment of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley may seem like an ecosystem of companies in which, more or less, everyone knows each other, and engineers They jump from company in company as in an exchange of chromos. However, a simple message in X has uncovered the case of Soham Parekh, an Indian engineer who, according to several startup founders, would have been working on several startups dedicated to AI.

Ok, Rubén, what is that strange? Many engineers do. The nuance is that he has done it at all at once cheating its employers and leaving a trail of doubts about whether I really had those skills.

A message raised the hare. It all started when Suhail Doshi, co -founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, published A message in x warning about this case: “There is a man named Soham Parekh (in India) who works simultaneously in three or four startups. He has been taking advantage of companies of and combinator and others. Be careful,” wrote the founder.

Doshi explained that Parekh had been working briefly in his company, Playground AI, but was fired in his first week after his deception was discovered. The surprise is that, following that publication, at least five CEOs and founders of other startups have confirmed that they had also hired Parekh during that time. “It has been doing this for years and works in more than four startups at the same time,” confirmed Nicolai Ouporov, CEO of Fleet AI.

Soham Parekh’s method. Beyond being an example of how to overcome selection processes and have Success in work interviewshe modus operandi from Parekh took advantage of the remote job offers of the startups to sign for them. The problem is that he signed for all at once and did not stop presenting all the New offers They were dating. Thus, when a company discovered and said goodbye, it began in a new one.

In other words, Parekh’s main job was not to work for the startups that hired him, but to do the interviews for which they were going to hire him.

Far from subtracting merits, thanks to his technical and communication skills, Parekh achieved impress recruiters In online interviews. “The guy was so intelligent when I interviewed him that it was crazy. Something did not square, so luckily I didn’t hire him, but fuck …” I wrote Justin Harvey, co -founder of Aivideo. Another founder, Adish Jain, founder of the AI ​​agents company for Mosaic video editing, He joined To the wave of confirmations: “I confirm it. This guy made us waste time for a month. He did very well in the interviews, but he is a liar.”

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An impeccable curriculum … to be false. Parekh’s curriculum shows that he had worked for companies such as Dynamo AI, Union AI, Synthesia and Alan AI, in addition to having a degree at the University of Mumbai and a master’s degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology. However, after a more detailed examination, Doshi says that “90 % of its curriculum seems false and most of the links no longer work,” public attaching a capture of the Parekh curriculum.

Some of the founders who claimed to have hired Parekh They started publishing the emails that the engineer had sent them as a presentation letter. To anyone’s surprise, they all followed the same employer and only changed the name of the company or the person to whom it was directed.

Parekh seams. Despite the curious of the phenomenon #sohamgate that has already become viral, what has really exposed are the seams of some ineffective recruitment processes and even negligent for not checking the curriculum or references of the candidate. “They should pay you to expose their failed contracting processes,” I wrote A software engineer.

In this case, in Parekh’s deception has been discovered because a good part of the startups in which “worked” belonged to the environment of And combinatorthe startup incubator that for years Sam Altman directed. But it would have been unnoticed if it had not focused on an environment as close as this business accelerator.

The ethical dilemma. Another issue that Sohamgate has put on the table is articulated on the ethics of working in two companies at the same time when both jobs develop remotely. It is not a new theme, since the teleworking became common, they have given themselves hundreds of cases in which workers took advantage of this model to distribute their time between the two jobs.

Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Researcher at Standfordassured that his research team has access to a private database of more than 100,000 engineers who work for more than 1,000 companies. That represents 0.5% of developers around the world. “Within this ‘little’ shows, we usually find engineers who work in 2 or more jobs”, I wrote In X. According to Denisov-Blanch calculations, more than 5% of the engineers would have More than a remote job.

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Image | Unspash (Mohammad Rahmani)