Soham Parekh is the latest tech legend, but whether he’s a villain, hero, or something else is up for debate.
Parekh came to prominence after Suhail Doshi, founder of Playground AI, posted to X that his company had hired Parekh, but fired him in his first week after realizing he was juggling multiple jobs.
Doshi wrote that he told him to stop “lying” and “scamming,” but that Parekh was still at it. Sure enough, other founders began replying that they, too, had hired Parekh, with many also firing him after realizing he was moonlighting.
Parekh guested on the TBPN podcast, where he admitted that while he wasn’t proud of it, he had simultaneously worked multiple jobs due to “extremely dire financial circumstances.”
Was he at least good at it?
Not really, but what human could crush four jobs at once?
Digger CEO Igor Zalutski told Business Insider that he’d interviewed Parekh and found him to be a “genuinely brilliant engineer” in the “top 0.1%,” but employers who hired him struggled with his chaotic availability and poor performance.
Parekh admitted he was working 140 hours per week without AI or hired help, just good ol’ sleep deprivation. At this point, it sounds like winning “Squid Game” may have been easier.
But was it unethical?
Opinions are mixed, with some obviously finding it wrong to lie to employers and snatch up positions and others finding him kind of a boss.
Regardless, juggling white-collar jobs has trended upward since the pandemic and the rise of remote work:
- In India, moonlighting increased by 25%-30% between 2020 and 2023, per The Times. AuthBridge, a background verification firm, found that of the 5% of applicants who were discovered to hold multiple jobs, 90% of those were in the tech sector.
- The r/overemployed subreddit has 451k members, all asking for advice and sharing tips on managing and occasionally hiding multiple jobs.
But while six-figure tech workers are getting all this attention, blue-collar workers have long juggled multiple jobs across shifts to make ends meet.
As of January, 5.4% of working Americans had more than one job, a number that’s increased since the pandemic.
As for Parekh, he intends to focus on his current job exclusively though, due to his continued financial issues, may ask his employers if he can add one more.
Labor
