Engineering to Deceive: The Talented Coder Who Just Keeps Getting Jobs
1/29/202628 min
When one tech founder tweets a warning about a seemingly prolific engineer named Soham Parekh, it sets off an avalanche. Turns out, Soham has been hired and paid by dozens of start-ups, sometimes working at several at once. He dazzled founders with coding tests, then vanished into a fog of excuses.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 0· Host0:00
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Josh Dean· Host0:03
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Brandi Churchwell0:05
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Speaker 30:06
So, what do you want me to say?
Margaux (Margot) McCall· Guest0:07
Yeah, what's going on here? Like, why- Oh, it's just, um, Chameleon.
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Chameleon.
Speaker 60:11
Chameleon.
Brandi Churchwell0:12
Chameleon Weekly. Oh.
Josh Dean· Host0:13
[laughs] [phone beeping] Last summer, Suhail Doshi, the founder of a Bay Area startup called Playground AI, fired up the machine formerly known as Twitter and wrote the following post. [pensive music] "There's a guy named Soham Parekh in India who works at three to four 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. He hasn't stopped a year later. No more excuses." Within minutes, the replies began to rain down. They continued throughout the afternoon and into the next day, other founder stories all saying some version of the same thing: "We hired him and promptly let him go. The crazy thing is we're fully in person in SF. He was in our office for one day before a series of lies about why he couldn't come in, as he was for sure working at other companies simultaneously. Absolutely unhinged behavior." "We just signed him up for our work trial next week. Saw this tweet, canceled work trial. He has been doing this for years and works at more than four startups at any given time." The thread grew, the tech rumor mill caught fire, and industry reporters like Margot McCall of Business Insider spotted the smoke billowing up.
Margaux (Margot) McCall· Guest1:28
It went super