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 informed him to stop lying/scamming people,” the post continued. “He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excutilizes.”

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Other people in the tech industest 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 stated, “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.”

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Arkadiy Telegin, cofounder of Leaping AI, posted a photo with Parekh and stated, “I also attempted giving him [the] benefit of the doubt. He was denying it till the very conclude. Funnily enough me and his other ’employer’ [Futilize AI] did a photo toobtainher when we found out. Never concludeed up sconcludeing it to him sadly.”

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

In an interview with Technology Business Programming Network, Parekh stated it’s true that he worked at multiple companies at once. He stated 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 stated he’s notorious among his friconcludes for not sleeping.)

Parekh also stated he’s written “every inch” of the code he built, not relying on junior engineers and only applying 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: