I can tell you it's because he's actually a very skilled engineer. He will blow the interviews completely out of the water. Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.

The problem is when the job (or work-trial in our case) actually starts, it's just excuses upon excuses as to why he's missing a meeting, or why the PR was pushed late. The excuses become more ridiculous and unbelievable, up until it's obvious he's just lying.

Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good. He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.

I worked with an overemployed person (not Soham). It was exactly like this.

Started out great. They could do good work when they knew they were in focus. Then they started pushing deliverables out farther and farther until it was obvious they weren't trying. Meetings were always getting rescheduled with an array of excuses. Lots of sad stories about family members having tragedies over and over again.

It wears everyone down. Team mates figure it out first. Management loses patience.

Worst part is that one person exhausts the entire department's trust. Remote work gets scrutinized more. Remote employees are tracked more closely. It does a lot of damage to remote work.

> Other people in this thread are incorrect, it's not a dev. shop. I worked with Soham in-person for 2 days during the work-trial process, he's good.

I doubt it's a dev shop because the dev shops use rotating stand-ins to collect the paychecks, not the same identity at every job. This guy wanted paychecks sent directly to him.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to hire other devs to outsource some of his workload while he remained the interaction point with the company.

> He left half of each day with some excuse about meeting a lawyer.

Wild to be cutting work trial days in half to do other jobs. Although I think he was also testing companies to see who was lenient enough to let him get away with all of this.

What a silly waste of his time and reputation (in addition to other people's).

If he's that competent, he could hire/mentor juniors and just use his skills to run a contracting business and keep making big bucks while not having to lie all the time?

Much much easier said than done.

99% of companies that want to hire employees won't hire a contractor/consultant instead for that job.

How do I know? 15 years experience, top candidate in many interviews, great salary / employment. Yet every time I've tried to get a consulting arrangement set up it's been extremely hard and ultimately unprofitable (i.e. pays significantly less than full-time job, on average).

Sounds like a legit negotiation strategy:

- You prefer a consulting arrangement over being hired.

- The company prefers to pay less for the job.

So both involved sides get a part of the pie that is negotiated about, and has to compromise on another aspect.

I work as a contractors with all my clients (who know of each others) and they all pay significantly more per hour compared to an employee. As an employee I could expect to make 1/4 of what I actually make.

The only exception in this arrangement was when I worked with an US company, they wanted to hire me as an employee and paid 1k per month to some company in my country just to hire me. An insane waste of money, not to mention taxes on my side.

I've worked with several small contracting businesses, including some that came highly recommended.

They were all very inefficient relative to having someone in-house. They also came with the problem that institutional knowledge was non-existent because they had a rotating crew of people working for you.

Hiring someone in-house is more efficient and better for building institutional knowledge. The companies he applied for specifically did not want to contract the work out to a body shop.

If you keep your standards high when hiring contractors you'll get the same level of quality you have with employees. Contractor agencies are also pretty happy to have long lasting clients (I have been with my current clients respectively for: 4 years, 3 years, 1 years and 1 month).

Getting that kind of pay at Meta at least, is less skill and more politics. If he had the soft skills to get that job he would be probably doing that.

It is hilarious that companies that hired a guy who was scamming them are also convinced they are great at assessing the skill level of devs.

Lots of devs don't have personal projects. I love programming but after spending the whole day programming I don't particularly want to go home and continue programming.

Someone can be a good developer and also be a scammer. I don't understand why you think this is hilarious or weird.

Also there's a ton amazing engs out there who want and need work but the companies all only want that one "perfect" guy (or gal), as if such a thing exists

This is in Norway, maybe it's different elsewhere.

> Easily top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates -- other startups will tell you this as well.

People who regularly don't show up for work are by definition not "top 1% or top 0.1% of candidates" - in fact quite the opposite.

That'll get you fired from PetSmart, let alone some bullshit $250k/yr software job.

I think startups' freewheeling management and hiring practices need examined because this would be caught by the most basic of background or reference checks at any traditional business.

Can't wait for Paul Graham's next essay on "How to Not Hire People Who Smoke Crack In the Toilets Instead of Showing Up for Work" for more informative life lessons.

Having worked at sexy-startup for 9 months recently with a good excuse why you left would get your resume to the top of the pile if it was read

By that you mean more like "he is top 0.1% at leetcode and whatever broken hiring process we have" ?

Why would really top 0.1% engineer go for all the hustle with small startups. If he could score a single job at some overfunded AI company and get even more with less risks?

This doesn't add up at all, sorry.

How do you measure that ? It seems like he wasn't a good candidate after all. I hope y`all learn a lesson about hiring and moving away from things that aren't signal to a job.

If they're so talented, then they should probably work on their own thing.

Possibly these are becoming more common because of /r/overemployed.

Most companies don't want you working another W-2 job, but realize they can't just ban all consulting.

That pretty much automatically rules out over employment because you can’t separately promise two different companies that you’re assigning all software copyrights to them rather than you, it’s an incompatible contract (even if it’s limited to work hours - you’re pretending to both companies that you’re working 9-5 solely for them).

There are some nuances and I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of it is that three ways to trigger the IP to attach to your employer:

1. You do it on-prem or during work hours (but work hours are flexible for salaried employees)

2. You do it using company equipment (say, company laptop at home)

3. It's reasonably related to what you or other people do at your day job

If none of those apply, then you own it. That's relevant to the discussion at hand because, at least in California, you could work from home for two companies with unrelated businesses and not break any rules.

Familiar to fans of HBO's _Silicon Valley_!

All successful big tech businesses - all of them - got that way by openly breaking laws. They don't trigger automatically, but upon a manual review, triggered by someone with at least a couple grand to spend on the endeavour. A lot flies under the radar in practice.

/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing

I would have thought that with the litigious culture in the US and non-competes etc... this would all be watertight. Seems kinda ridiculous that with a non-compete you can't work for a competitor once you've quit but you're free to do so while you still work for your employer, lol.

While US employment is usually at will without a defined contract term, there are mutually enforceable obligations, including some definition of what the employee is obligated to do for the employer and that the employer is obligated to pay the employee at some specified rate assuming the employee's obligations are met. That's a contract. Exactly what the detailed terms are may be difficult to prove absent a single comprehensive written document, but it is a contract.

Really? Does that mean what it say: you get a job and you do not get a written contract?

I don't think, in 38 years of working in 3 different countries, I've ever NOT had a written contract, even for temp or contractor roles. WTAF?

I don't think anyone has the morals or trust anymore for the way we used to do corporate work.

If you can get and hold dozens of concurrent full-time engineering jobs by scamming people, you can get much further much more quickly than is possible in any one of the full-time engineering jobs you can get.

This is obviously unethical, relies on non-guaranteed success, and falls apart if people are able to effectively claw back your gains from scamming, but that's not (obviously) enough to outweigh the desire for quick returns for some people.

Do you really think several busy startups are going to band up and sue a person (esp in California)?

Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t, but keeping the myth going even if it comes with bad stories is valuable.

k

1. You can use an employer of record service which costs a few hundred bucks a month – it seems like a lot... but if I'm already paying a recruiter £12 to £25k to find me a senior data engineer in London on £80 to 120k that is going to want to WFH 3/4 days a week, I will gladly pay £400/mo for an EOR service

2. You can also not hire them, and use their services as independent contractors instead. I've never had an issue doing this with my finance teams, as long as the contractor submits a valid invoice they don't care who they are. Plus, it's good for cashflow (net 30 to net 90 is pretty standard) and the hire gets a nice tax save on their end.

I do understand that at large companies it can be tricky, but IMHO at startups there is little excuse. I suppose it all doesn't matter if you're playing with unlimited silicon valley VC money, I've only ever had to deal with european investors and they love a bit of smart frugality.

I agree if I had the UK talent pool domestically, European investors, a different health insurance regime, and existed in a different timezone, the calculus might be different.

Aside: how many people were at the company where you were paying recruiters $25k to find people?

I know several people who spent months working for two companies: one full time, the other part time. The most productive few would reach two full time positions and actually keep delivering for over a year.

The reason this happens at all is that sufficiently large organisations expect performance to be in a specific range - if it's too low you'll be fired, but going the extra mile will not yield benefits, as your compensation is decided by the assigned budget and promotions are rare.

Case in point: a few years ago my former co-worker was given "overtime" which was actually a hidden raise, as management really wanted to keep him, but couldn't officially increase his compensation. The organisation for which we worked eventually cracked down on such practices, so he left to work at a place which would compensate him this much and more without resorting to such tricks.

https://youtu.be/IWMngMm3_88

* "He's a great engineer" - Yet he's ineffective at doing the job and touch fired him? * "He's top 0.1%" - Of what exactly? How can it be the case when you fired him?

You literally didn't do reference checks properly and you got caught out. And it's all written like these companies are the victims. You're better off admitting that you don't know how to hire.

Soham's behaviour is one thing, but working for any of these companies he was at is a literal red flag.

You never really know what someone will do after they’re onboarded, even if they ace the interviews. When people say he’s a good engineer, they mean he crushed pair programming and skill tests. When he actually showed up, he did good work. Problem was he was juggling so many jobs he was always making excuses as to why he wasn't available. And he wasn’t upfront as to why.

We do reference checks. But when someone kills your interviews, you have to move fast or risk losing them to another offer. Time kills deals - and the best candidates usually get multiple offers. Waiting for every reference isn’t always an option. Most people are ethical, so you trade some risk for speed. In Soham’s case, one reference checked out, the other never replied. A few unaffiliated references said they remembered him from previous stops on the resume but hadn't worked with him directly.

If someone starts making excuses right away or seems off, it’s your job to cut them loose fast. Most companies did just that.

My advice to companies is to stop chasing unicorns and 10x engineers. Intentionally try to hire ordinary average engineers. Your company making a SaaS app doesn’t need talented programmers, it just needs ordinary ones.

Ego leads founders to chase top 1% talent in some cases. In other cases the product is terrible but they think hiring an amazing programmer will pull them out of the dive. It won’t. Just hire normal people and build normally.

Either pick someone inside who really wants the job, or find a brilliant new graduate who really wants the job.

It’s usually safer and cheaper.

This is what makes this story so funny. A lot of people are mad at the guy that found an exploit in the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system without a lick of ire directed at the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system.

Like if everybody’s profile on a dating app said “only interested in talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger”, then somebody’s eventually going to get catfished by a fake Kindergarten Cop. It’s kind of a “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” situation

Other engineers make horrendous mistakes too. Other engineers just get by too.

If you think a piece of paper means really a lot, then so be it.

What if you did engineering before and just moved to software engineering because that somehow pays more than the noble profession of engineering?

“Also, he never shipped anything good.”

Hiring is completely broken in a lot of tech. Getting the right companies on your resume early on — regardless of your skills — makes you a made person. And then if you know how to game interviews, you’ll be double made.

Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?

[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940441569276158190

Given that there's no oversight of the verification process, that can slide, too.

I'm no longer job searching but every interview involved multiple steps and "background checks."

I'm seeing the dude's resume has him working half a dozen jobs in a year which even to me is a huge red flag. Then he has a github with automated commits... I don't want to be disparaging to start ups because its brutal out there but how does someone like that have such a high success rate? Is he taking a super low salary or something?

There was one Tweet from someone who said they did a reference check from someone who said he did good work when he was working, but he was working multiple jobs at the same time so he wasn't working much. Maybe he assumed his references wouldn't be checked often, and maybe he was right?

worked for us for almost a year and did a solid job (we also let him go when we discovered the multiple jobs)

Think it says a lot about this industry if "really talented 'engineer'" means passing loads of gamified interviews and not delivering things on time.

In my opinion and experience, being a competent developer and being a good interviewer are even less related than being a competent developer and being a good interviewee (and the latter are already very unrelated).

When I used to interview I always had to check a box that said I wasn't currently employed, or they would ask at some point.

It also drags everyone else down. The team figures out what's going on. They get tired of adjusting their communication around the one person who's always distracted and doing something else.

Basically, it turns into a lot of work for everyone else to get work out of the OE person. Like they can do good work, but they're going to make everyone else work hard to extract it from them because they're busy juggling multiple jobs.

All of the Soham stories I've read today have been the same: Good work when he was working, but he was caught because he wasn't working much.

Individual performance doesn’t matter. Team performance does. All of this work to find 10x engineers is meaningless if they can’t raise the output of the team itself. People can make their teams better (sometimes with elite communication skills instead of technical), but we should be focusing more on building 10x teams, not trying to find unicorns.

I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.

It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.

It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.

I had the same experience as you with an "overemployed" person: Working with them is really bad for everyone else. They lie, play extreme politics, throw teammates under the bus, make you work harder for everything, and they don't care if it causes you harm because you're just a temporary coworker at one of their "Js"

There's nothing to celebrate about these people. They screw over their teammates far more than the company they work for.

What blows my mind is people think overemployment of an engineer is bad, but it is more than acceptable for CEO to held top positions in different companies.

The difference is in most cases the CEO owns the business or a good chunk of it so they’re actually capital owners and employees in name only. If you own the business you make the rules.

To the extent.

I own my skills and I make the rules. To the extent.

So you could fight us, but plenty just join us in playing games, lowering expectations, and collecting their check and going home. We are awful colleagues if you have ambition, but if you do not, we get along fine with people.

Cults are a subset of teams.

Both have implicit contracts, and a contract requires consideration on both sides. The parties define the value of the consideration, so you can have a junior cult member who feels they are getting good value for what they pay, or a SW dev at an insurance company who feels they don't. I also don't see much difference in your ability to affect your situation if you are unhappy with the current state.

Typically employers pay you and cults don't.

He would blow off any meeting before noon. Just wouldn't show up.

His work was usually late and rushed/poor quality. Lots of corners cut. Oftentimes he didn't even get something right the first time because he didn't have the full context because he missed discussion that happened in the meetings he didn't show up to.

He was full of shit. Every day he was having some personal tragedy. Excuse after excuse.

He started trouble with teammates in a way I've just never seen before.

He was just all around a net negative even though he occasionally did decent work. Everyone was happy to see him go.

I don’t know the guy, but I feel like a lot of people are missing this angle - just because you’re technically capable, doesn’t mean you’re actually motivated or that you actually bother to deliver. You can also be lazy and just collect your check.

The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.

Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.

The math doesn't work long term. It may be kept for 1-2 months even when a person is 21 yrs old, but I doubt it it can be sustained more than that.

Lol - you don't have enough hobbies.

I literally have a computer at hand 24/7 now, I’m almost never bored. It’s kinda crazy to think about much of a change that is.

Just imagine being one of the people who legit joins a startup, is passionate, working long hours, earning your vest, to have your coworker pretending to be working.

Tired of considering this “normal” and nobody talking about it. But when one simple engineer does it, well, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, yada yada.

Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, why not dedicate the remaining 20 hours to another corp, and double your comp? Everyone wins.

HackerNews dudes claiming they do a true minimum 40 hours per week, every week, forever, of heads-down hard-work are deluding themselves. I really don't understand the overemployment hatred this forum has. There are plenty of folks who really do solid work at 2+ jobs, not half-assing and politicking.

Disclaimer: I am not OE.

Wage theft vastly outstrips other forms of theft[0] and it's considered a complete non priority by law enforcement, politicians, and the media.

These kinds of things just aren't a priority for one reason for another. Let's brainstorm some solutions to wage theft and overemployment.

I suggest a synergistic approach -- fix wage theft and it'll have a knock-on effective with things like overemployment or people pretending to work a single job.

What do you think?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft#/media/File:Wage_th...

I don't think this is uncommon.

If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.

Given these two factors, I don’t think it would be out of the realm of possibility for something like this to happen.

Perhaps, he is also genuinely good at cracking these interviews. No wonder, he's been through so many of them.

I think the purpose of the interview is the same thing. Even though there's no strong evidence for a correlation it's reasonable to believe intuitively that there is.

The same goes for hiring tricks. When some hiring signal becomes a trick that gets passed around by influencers, it ceases to become a useful hiring signal because everyone is gaming it.

If this guy started advertising his process, everyone would start doing his process and it would stop working.

[0] https://x.com/Suhail/status/1940287384131969067

Office politics comes after you land a job so it doesn’t explain why he was so successful at getting multiple offers.

I’ve seen claims on Twitter that he used multiple tactics:

1. Good ol’ cold emails;

2.Using a recruiter for warm intros

3. Applying like everyone else but with a resume that is full of fabrications.

A common thread in many of his victim companies: he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.

You think? I'm extending the term to actually getting a job in "traditional" organizations. You already have to optimize for keywords etc, don't you? It's not human interaction but a "process".

> he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.

But they got an "AI" engineer didn't they? Or no one in management could define what an "AI" engineer is?

Tbh I'd give the guy a high paying job, but in marketing.

Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.

Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.

If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.

Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.

At least in western europe, it’s very hard to land a 130K job, but two 65K jobs? Rather fine.

Also don't most work contracts expressly prohibit taking a second job, with the reasoning that the company expects employees to rest so they stay productive in the main job?

It's hard to get a 130K job in EU but it's easy to reach and exceed that as an independent contractor, so that's an avenue you could try out.

So it is absolutely impossible for someone here to have two full time jobs without committing working time fraud.

But even if you could, it would make literally no sense two have jobs as you earn vastly more with freelancing anyway. You would scam yourself.

The most optimal move is to have one regular job so you get health care and social security and do freelancing on the side. If you work contract allows that, of course.