1 engineer, many jobs and a hiring reckoning for tech
As tweets tumbled one after the other, many founders revealed they had met the engineer online and were impressed in the interview before they hired him. 'He did so incredibly well in interviews, must have a lot of training,' wrote Flo Crivello, another founder based in San Francisco, adding that the lesson they learnt from this was to always run backdoor checks and spend more time scrolling Twitter. 'He has been doing this for years and works at more than four startups at any given time,' wrote Nicolai Ouporov posting an email from the engineer. 'We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and let him go,' wrote New York-based Matthew Parkhurst, joking that hiring Soham seems to be the new rite of passage for startups in San Francisco. Another founder wrote how they had interviewed Parekh in a WeWork and then saw him giving an interview to another startup in the same coworking space. Gerry Tan, president and CEO of YCombinator, posted a meme of Scooby Doo catching a thief. 'The startup guild of YC is a necessary invention to help founders be more successful that they would be alone,' he joked. As the controversy tumbled into a meme, a fake Parekh account blossomed on X and people started to joke about hiring the engineer. And urban legends started doing the rounds -- such as one that suggested that Parekh had several software mules working for him.
This is another scam in a list of scams that the Silicon Valley has gone through, but what it tells us is that there is a lack of good quality engineers to hire. Startups in the Valley often end up hiring remote workers – living in other cities or across the world (for instance, it isn't clear where Parekh is based). This and the fact that coding can now be done with AI, has made it possible for smart engineers to take up multiple jobs. There is even a Reddit sub r/overemployed which supports jobstacking and moonlighting. You can potentially have multiple jobs, say no to meeting online or in real life and get multiple salaries. Some startup founders even appreciated the hustle that came with moonlighting this way.
What the controversy also shows us is that we're increasingly working with people we haven't met and might not meet in real life. I have worked for and hired remotely on projects. Many a times, it was a few years before I met the people in person. Sometimes, even when you're in the same city, country or state, you end up working on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
With sophisticated video and interactive apps, working remotely with each other is easier. However, as AI-generated fake profiles proliferate, we have also become susceptible to scams. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find out if someone whose profile you saw on LinkedIn is real or not. And I'm not talking about them lying about their credentials. I'm talking about completely synthetic profiles with AI-generated photographs. LinkedIn's transparency report mentioned that in 2024, more than 70 million fake accounts were identified and removed during the registration process.
There are high chances today that someone you are friends with online is a synthetic digital persona. With audio-video generation, it has become easier to develop a fake persona, complete with videos and even real-time interaction on Zoom. As these scams become increasingly sophisticated, we will see more of them happening around us – to our friends or our colleagues.
But as is the nature of Silicon Valley, the problem of synthetic digital scams has given rise to another industry. Startups are building cryptographically-signed blockchain for digital identity – to protect our identity from being stolen and abused in digital spaces.
Next time you give an interview, the startup founder will probably ask you to give a block-chained verifiable digital identity to prove that you're you and that you're real in the video interview. Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy Sohamgate play out on social media.
Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area.
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