Silicon Valley v Soham Parekh, the man who had too many jobs
The hustlers' culture appears to have limits, however, as start-up founders lined up this weekend to call out an Indian software engineer for working with at least four tech companies at once.
'There's a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 start-ups at the same time … beware,' Suhail Doshi, the founder of the software company Playground AI, said on X. '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.' The post was liked more than 250,000 times.
• How I juggle three jobs at once: the rise of 'fractional workers'
Founders of other Silicon Valley companies such as Dynamo AI, Union.ai, Synthesia, Alan AI and GitHub also accused Parekh of working multiple jobs.
Haz Hubble said his social media company, Pally, offered him a package worth $250,000 a year, before withdrawing the offer when Parekh refused to relocate to San Francisco. Hubble told the US broadcaster CNBC: 'Now we know why!'
Matthew Parkhurst, founder of the financial software start-up Antimetal, said on X that his company 'realised pretty quickly that [Parekh] was working at multiple companies and let him go'.
Parekh, from Mumbai, has admitted the deceit, telling the technology programme TBPN: 'I'm not proud of what I've done and don't endorse it either.'
He juggled roles by working for 12-14 hours every day. The motivation, he said, was that he needed money to clear debts. He did not say how these were incurred.
'No one really likes to work 140 hours a week, but I had to do this out of necessity. I was in extremely dire financial circumstances,' he said. His lifestyle turned him into a 'serial non-sleeper', he added.
Parekh is by no means alone, with the rise in remote working since the Covid pandemic blamed for the surge in moonlighting.
In India, the practice has increased by 25-30 per cent between 2020 and 2023, according to the recruitment agency Randstad India. It has prompted the use of software to verify applicants' backgrounds and flag any overlapping employment.
• The rise of 'polygamous workers' — and efforts to catch them out
The background verification firm AuthBridge said 5 per cent of candidates had two jobs, with roughly 90 per cent of cases occurring in the tech sector.
In 2022, the IT company Wipro sacked 300 employees who were found to also be working for rival companies. 'This is cheating, plain and simple,' said Rishad Premji, its chairman.
The practice is not limited to the private sector. Some teachers in state schools take a salary but rarely turn up as they are busy working in a private school or tutoring. Road sweepers have been known to delegate the job to someone else — usually a relative — while working for a higher salary somewhere else.
• Civil servant 'held three full-time jobs simultaneously'
Despite his dishonesty, Parekh said he 'cared deeply' about the companies he had inveigled and denied having a team of junior software developers to help him cope with the workload, saying he had no funds to hire anyone.
Parekh's exposure has done his career no harm. He said he was working for a new company and wanted to focus on it exclusively, but admitted he had still not resolved his financial problems.
He said he may yet approach his current employer to ask if he could take on another job — but vowed to take a more 'candid' approach.
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