Then his identify started surfacing throughout founder circles: Hacker Information threads, Slack channels, Twitter jokes, Reddit threads. One YC-backed startup after one other realized they’d employed him. Not in sequence—on the identical time.
Some discovered after a couple of weeks. One workforce stated he labored with them for practically a yr. The tales converge on the identical arc: stellar interviews, quick onboarding, some early output. Then missed conferences. Odd excuses. Gaps in availability. In a single case, Soham turned up for a trial in particular person, then left midway via the day, saying he needed to meet a lawyer.
He didn’t disappear. He simply stored exhibiting up some other place.
The query isn’t how he received away with it. The query is why it was really easy.
Soham Parekh just isn’t the primary engineer to work a number of jobs in parallel. In November 2022, Vainness Truthful revealed a bit titled “Overemployed in Silicon Valley: How Scores of Tech Employees Are Secretly Juggling A number of Jobs.” It instructed of engineers quietly holding down two, three, even 4 full-time roles. Some used mouse-jigglers to faux exercise. Others ran a number of laptops. One admitted to outsourcing work to Fiverr. Just a few labored in coordinated Discord communities, sharing ways.
“I’m undecided in the event that they even know I’m right here anymore,” one engineer instructed the reporter. “All my paychecks are nonetheless coming in.”
On the time, it learn like a side effect of the remote-work boom. An odd consequence of too many laptops and never sufficient oversight. Soham didn’t want any of that infrastructure. He used his actual identify. Actual resume. Confirmed up on video calls. Wrote code. Left a path. He simply moved via the system cleanly.
What his story reveals is how little it takes to get employed—and keep employed.
One startup stated he “crushed the interviews.” One other referred to as him “prime 0.1%.” Founders praised his GitHub, his aspect tasks, his e mail follow-ups. They solely noticed the crimson flags as soon as the true work started. That hole—between efficiency in a vetting course of and precise engagement—isn’t incidental. It’s structural.
Startups, particularly ones chasing development, have narrowed hiring into structured calls and take-home duties. Processes are recycled throughout founder networks. Tradition match turns into a checkbox. More often than not, it comes all the way down to intestine really feel. Which is simply one other means of claiming: we don’t actually know. In that sort of system, somebody who interviews nicely and ships sufficient can coast for months. If that particular person can also be working three different jobs, the indicators fade step by step. By the point somebody notices, it’s already awkward to ask.
There’s one other wrinkle. Soham could not have been doing something that couldn’t be accomplished as we speak by an AI agent.
Multiple founder joked—what if he was a bot?
That query now not lands as satire. Brokers as we speak can write code, reply help tickets, even joke in Slack. In some unspecified time in the future, you cease noticing the distinction.
And when you can’t inform whether or not you’re working with a disengaged worker or a reliable script—what precisely are you hiring?
We’ve seen this fragility earlier than.
In 2022, Wipro fired 300 employees for “moonlighting.” Chairman Rishad Premji referred to as it “dishonest—plain and easy.” The corporate stated some had been working for rivals. The backlash was swift. Critics identified that many executives sit on a number of boards. Others questioned the demand for loyalty from a system that not often presents the identical in return.
That episode surfaced a buried reality: the foundations of labor have modified. Expectations haven’t.
Soham Parekh is a consequence of that mismatch. He’s not a rogue actor. He’s the product of a hiring tradition that values efficiency over presence, supply over connection. A tradition that claims to construct groups however not often asks who’s truly a part of them.
So what occurs when the subsequent Soham is indistinguishable from an AI agent?
Srikanth Nadhamuni, the previous CTO of Aadhaar, believes we’ll have to rethink id itself. In a latest paper, he proposed Personhood Credentials—a cryptographic and biometric framework to show that an individual behind a digital interplay is actual, distinctive, and singular.
The idea sounds summary, even dystopian. However Nadhamuni argues that in a world of deepfakes and artificial voice brokers, techniques like Aadhaar—initially constructed for public verification—might assist anchor digital interactions to precise people. He describes it as a privacy-preserving firewall towards the collapse of trust on-line.
It raises actual questions. About privateness, about exclusion, in regards to the sort of infrastructure we’re keen to just accept within the identify of certainty. However it additionally names the factor most firms fake to not see: when you don’t know who’s on the opposite aspect of the display, you’re not hiring an individual. You’re hiring a sample.
And if Soham Parekh handed each take a look at and nonetheless wasn’t who we thought he was—what occurs when the subsequent Soham isn’t even human?
Pankaj Mishra is a journalist and co-founder of FactorDaily.
