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The tech industry is reeling after a software engineer was exposed as working at several Silicon Valley startups at the same time — and experts say it’s a lesson on hustle culture gone too far.
Soham Parekh, a software engineer from Mumbai, went viral on social media after being accused by Playground AI founder Suhail Doshi on X of working at a number of startups simultaneously.
Doshi wrote: “There’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC [Y Combinator] 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.”
The post racked up 25,000 likes with more founders coming forward about hiring Parekh, including AI startup Lindy, which fired him after seeing Doshi’s post.
Matthew Parkhurst, founder of software startup Antimetal, said Parekh was the company’s first engineering hire in 2022 and was smart and likable. “We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and let him go,” Parkhurst said on X.
Other founders like Haz Hubble, the co-founder of social media scheduler Pally, also came forward about offering Parekh a founding engineer role.
“To me it seems he must be addicted to the game of getting job offers, rather than actually making money, given he never lasts more than a few weeks and rarely gets paid. It begs the question — why?”
In an interview on tech show TBPN on Thursday, Parekh admitted that it was true he was working for multiple startups at once and wasn’t proud of what he had done.
“No one really likes to work 140 hours a week, but I had to do this out of necessity,” Parekh said in the show. “I was in extremely dire financial circumstances.”
Parekh said he only started doing this in 2022, and the grueling lifestyle meant he became a “serial non-sleeper.”
He added that he “cared about these companies” and “greed wasn’t an incentive,” despite his financial situation. He said he always took the lower pay, higher equity offer at companies.
The tech community on social media is divided, however, with some questioning the ethics of secretly working multiple jobs, while others wonder how Parekh pulled it off.
A ‘widespread’ problem
The tale of Parekh is not unique within the tech industry, with many tech workers covertly working multiple jobs in recent years in an effort to shield themselves from mass layoffs and job market uncertainty.
A subreddit called “r/overemployed” was created in 2021, with users sharing advice on how they manage to balance multiple jobs without being detected.
“It caused, in some cases, this type of behavior to be more widespread than it was during non-pandemic times.”
Voica noted that the rise of remote work was instrumental in enabling this behavior amongst tech workers. “That led to obviously incredible benefits for hard-working people, but also allowed people who have maybe this type of attitude to, all of a sudden, get jobs that they wouldn’t have before.”
Having at least two jobs is also common within India’s IT sector. There was a 25-30% increase in moonlighting seen between 2020 and 2023, according to Randstad India, with workers citing factors such as low pay and remote work.
‘Extreme end of Hustle culture’
While Parekh’s grueling work hours are unusual — even in tech — it’s a reminder of how deeply hustle culture is entrenched within the industry.
“What we’re seeing is the extreme end of hustle culture: when work becomes performance, and identity becomes fragmented.”
Zaytsev explained that Parekh essentially passed multiple rounds of technical interviews because soft skills aren’t as valued in tech. Qualities like commitment, reliability and team presence “are often overlooked until there’s a crisis,” he said.
“Burnout is a predictable outcome when the workplace culture rewards overcommitment and treats exhaustion as a badge of honor. Soham’s admission that he worked 140 hours a week is not just unhealthy, it’s a reflection of a system that equates worth with output,” he added.
Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton Capital, said this debate came about due to “a fetishization of overwork” and a glorification of hustle culture in the tech and startup scene in Silicon Valley.
Flexible working at risk
Synthesia’s Voica warned that workers who take advantage of flexible working policies risk painting other engineers in a bad light, and could have these benefits taken away.
“Most of the engineers that I know are very hard working, very dedicated, very passionate, and then when you have this type of more cavalier behavior, it sets this tone that this is normal behavior in the community,” Voica explained.
This might cause employers to second-guess whether they should keep hybrid working policies in place, he said.
“This is going to impact women. It’s going to impact people with disabilities [and] the more vulnerable, who actually benefited from this [flexible] work arrangement, and now they’re going to be impacted by this type of behavior,” he added.