Engineering to Deceive: The Talented Coder Who Just Keeps Getting Jobs

Summary

Chameleon: "Engineering to Deceive – The Talented Coder Who Just Keeps Getting Jobs"

Podcast: Chameleon | Audiochuck & Campside Media
Host: Josh Dean
Date: January 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Chameleon explores the strange, headline-grabbing tale of Soham Parekh, a prodigiously talented software engineer from India. Known for fraudulently accepting and juggling multiple jobs—sometimes simultaneously at over a dozen startups—Soham's story set Silicon Valley abuzz. Was he a scammer, a hustler, a casualty of tech’s overemployment culture, or all of the above? Host Josh Dean and tech journalist Emma Siminoff break down the engineering world’s tolerance for deception, the specifics of Soham’s startling run, and what it says about the culture of tech work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Initial Uproar: Soham Goes Viral ([00:45]–[04:25])

• Last summer, Suhail Doshi (founder, Playground AI) blew the whistle via X/Twitter, revealing Soham's pattern of deception at YC startups and urging caution.
• Other founders rapidly chimed in with similar horror stories:
  • Soham “works at three to four startups at the same time”
  • Hired and fired within days after a series of lies and disappearing acts
  • Even tricked fully in-person companies—despite (allegedly) living in India

  “Within minutes, the replies began to rain down.” – Josh Dean [00:45]

• A public tracker listed Soham as having been in talks with at least 55 companies, hired and paid by 19+, sometimes for periods as brief as three days.

  “Those numbers, if anything, are probably low.” – Josh Dean [03:17]

2. How Soham Did It: Methods & the Founders’ Perspective ([04:25]–[09:06])

• Soham aced in-person coding tests, proving real technical ability, then would disappear, breadcrumb responses, and produce code only sporadically.
• Startups, desperate for engineers, failed basic due diligence—especially risky for small, in-person teams.

  “The Reddit ‘overemployed’ is full of people working two to three jobs. The point is you join big companies that work remotely. He was running small companies that worked in person... huge flaw in the plan.” – Emma Siminoff [04:25]

• Soham often took higher equity, lower salary compensation packages—bizarre, given he never stayed long enough to vest.

3. The Create/Sync Fiasco: A Case Study ([04:45]–[09:06])

• Dhruv Amin (ex-Google, founder of Create) hired Soham as engineer #5.
  • Soham “got sick” day one, requested his laptop shipped to a coworking space.
  • Dhruv realized Soham was actively updating other startups’ codebases on GitHub.
  • Upon confrontation, Soham lied, promised improvement, cited chronic health and visa troubles—but kept slipping.
  • Fired when Sync (the other startup) named Soham their ‘Employee of the Month’ the same day he was let go from Create.

  “I was pissed, then impressed. Still not sure how he pulled it off... hope he had a good reason. Feels like a stressful way to make money.” – Founder quoted by Josh Dean [07:59]

• Most companies never received their company laptops back:

  “He must have so many at this point. Maybe that’s the whole scam.” – Emma Siminoff, joking [08:58]

4. Soham’s (Bizarrely) Open Media Tour ([09:47]–[16:48])

• After being exposed, Soham gave interviews—TVPN podcast, “Singh in the USA”—often sidestepping hard questions:
  • Claimed “dire financial circumstances” and “necessity” ([10:31])
  • Hosts fawned over his “cold email” skills instead of pushing on dishonesty ([11:03])
  • Inconsistently claimed it was about money, and then “the love of the game” ([12:45])
  • Falsified a master’s degree from Georgia Tech on resumes, explaining:

    “It’s not false. That would have been my year if I would have gone, which is why I put it in the CV…” – Soham Parekh [15:40]

  • Claimed at most two concurrent jobs, contradicting crowdsourced evidence.

5. The Culture of Overemployment in Tech ([17:17]–[24:07])

• The subreddit r/overemployed and COVID-19 remote work accelerated engineers taking on double/full workloads for doubled pay.
  • Tips exchanged for avoiding detection: muting cameras, managing employer spyware, overlapping schedules.

    “It’s a crazy Reddit thread … a whole community getting away with this right now.” – Emma Siminoff [18:34]

• Stanford’s Igor Denisov Blanc, who studies tech productivity, notes the phenomenon is normalized—just not at Soham’s extreme:

  “Most people don’t have 15 jobs at the same time. … There’s empirical proof this happens quite often.” – Igor Denisov Blanc [19:02]

  • Engineering’s output is easy to hide/overlap, further enabled by remote work and financial incentives.
  • Soham specifically exploited “ramp-up periods” at new jobs, jumping before being found out:

    “Instead of holding 15 jobs for two years, he would always be onboarding and offboarding… That’s how he increased his concurrent paychecks.” – Igor Denisov Blanc [21:16]

6. Ghost Engineers & Industry Implications ([22:55]–[25:41])

• Blanc highlights the "ghost engineer": a full-time engineer delivering as little as 10% of expected output.
• Their research suggests ~10% of all engineers qualify as severe underperformers (“ghosts”)—mirrored elsewhere in white-collar work.
• Those who admit being ghost engineers often cite loss of motivation:

  “I used to care. But then … I started to disengage. Nothing would happen… Eventually I was just hardly doing anything, collecting the same paycheck.” – Igor Denisov Blanc relaying a confession [25:05]

7. Where Is Soham Now? ([26:11]–[27:06])

• After all the exposure and firings, Soham was once again employed—at an AI startup called Darwin.
  • The company stood by Soham, as is often the case in Silicon Valley’s culture of second chances.

    “Silicon Valley … second chances are abundant. … There’s a lot of grace.” – Emma Siminoff [26:46]

  • As Soham put it:

    “They’ve put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove.” – Soham Parekh [26:54]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The crazy thing is … he was in our office for a day before … excuses why he couldn’t come in. … Absolutely unhinged behavior.” – Quoted founder, via Josh Dean [01:00]
• “Maybe the whole scam is the laptops.” – Emma Siminoff, joking [08:58]
• “No one really likes to work 140 hours a week… I had to do this out of necessity.” – Soham Parekh [10:31]
• “He was very enamored with sort of the mythology of Silicon Valley.” – Emma Siminoff [09:30]
• “If there was a parallel universe where my financial circumstances were better, I would start my own company.” – Soham Parekh [16:28]
• “Are we all doing this work thing wrong?” – Josh Dean [24:00]
• “1 in 10, 1 in 12 engineers is a severe underperformer.” – Igor Denisov Blanc [24:07]
• “What the host of the TBPN podcast had said was apparently true. At least one company didn’t mind the noise.” – Josh Dean [26:46]

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Timestamps: Important Segments

• [00:45] – Soham Parekh’s scam is exposed, founders react online
• [04:45] – Dhruv Amin’s firsthand account: hiring, confronting, and firing Soham
• [07:59] – “Employee of the Month” at another company, same day fired
• [09:47] – Soham’s podcast appearances, shifting narratives, lies about credentials
• [17:17] – Deep dive: r/overemployed and the normalization of dual jobs
• [19:02] – Industry research: how common is overemployment, and why?
• [22:55] – Ghost engineers: prevalence, motivations, and data
• [26:11] – Soham’s latest job, the Silicon Valley culture of forgiveness

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Tone & Speaker Attribution

• Host Josh Dean: Dryly skeptical, engaging, pulls back to “what does all this mean?” tone.
• Emma Siminoff (producer/journalist): Wry, incredulous, focused on industry patterns and the absurdity.
• Soham Parekh: Contradictory, self-effacing, sometimes charming, always evasive.
• Igor Denisov Blanc (Stanford researcher): Analytical, data-driven, calm.

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Summary & Insights

Soham Parekh’s tale is a case study of how technical skill, desperation, and the chaotic hiring culture of Silicon Valley combined to produce a true scammer-who-maybe-wasn’t-entirely-a-scam. The episode delves far beyond Soham's individual story, exposing a tech economy in which deception can thrive and even be weirdly admired. For all the founders shaken, laptops lost, and jobs gamed, tech culture’s obsession with hustle and “optimization” is both the enabler and the audience for such theater.

In the end, Chameleon leaves listeners wondering: In a world that celebrates the hustle, what’s really the line between ingenuity and fraud—and who’s making the rules?

Transcript

[Brandi Churchwell]

In the world of true crime, the real story isn't always in the headlines. It's in the evidence. I'm Brandi Churchwell, host of 13th Juror podcast, and I'm here to take you past the news cycle and straight into the courtroom. Every week I'll break down the investigation, the prosecution, the defense, and everything that unfolds beyond the jury box. We'll examine every testimony, every exhibit, and every hidden matter motive. Listen to 13th Juror wherever you get your podcasts, Campsite Media.

[Josh Dean]

Hello.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

What is.

[Soham Parekh]

What do you want me to say?

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

Chameleon Chameleon Chameleon Weekly oh.

[Josh Dean]

Last summer, Suhail Doshi, the founder of a Bay Area startup called Playground AI, fired up the machine formerly known as Twitter and wrote the following post There's a guy named Soham Parekh in India who works at three to four startups at the same time. He's been preying on YC 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. Within minutes, the replies began to rain down. They continued throughout the afternoon and into the next day. Other founder stories all saying some version of the same thing. We hired him and promptly let him go. The crazy thing is we're fully in person in sf. He was in our office for one day before a series of lies about why he couldn't come in, as he was for sure working at other companies simultaneously. Absolutely unhinged behavior. We just signed him up for our work trial next week. Saw this tweet. Canceled work trial? He has been doing this for years and works at more than four startups at any given time. The thread grew, the tech rumor mill caught fire and industry reporters like Margot McCall of Business Insider spotted the smoke built blowing up.

[Emma Siminoff]

It went super viral and the replies were basically flooded with founders. A bunch of them like currently had him hired, which I'm sure was trippy for them to see other founders being like, we are currently employing this man.

[Josh Dean]

It felt like a surreal and only in Silicon Valley Storyline A software engineer who somehow simultaneously worked for and in some cases screwed over multiple startups at once, who somehow secured in person gigs in San Francisco despite apparently residing in India. Honestly, it felt like a plotline from Silicon Valley, the Mike Judge HBO sitcom that made such great fun of Bay Area tech culture.

[Emma Siminoff]

The story was very similar from founder to founder. He would often come in for in person interviews so they would watch him code so he wasn't using AI coders. He wasn't cheating on their coding tests. They were super impressed with him. He was obviously very talented to get all these jobs.

[Josh Dean]

This engineer, Soham, had an mo he'd.

[Emma Siminoff]

Come in for a few days, like blow them out of the water, be really great, and then basically disappear, kind of breadcrumb them, respond sometimes, give them code sometimes. And a lot of times these founders would catch him. Like they'd kind of realize something was up and he would often get fired pretty early on.

[Josh Dean]

One founder noted in the thread that hiring and firing Soham was a real blow to his company's momentum. Quote, honestly, one of my lowest points. And he saw this impromptu Twitter thread, founders helping Founders, as a godsend for his tribe. Sahel is helping so many companies from future headaches and hopefully encouraging others to avoid such bad behavior, he wrote. Obviously Soham's talent was real. You might fool a founder or two, but an actual fraud of an engineer, someone just playing a part, wasn't getting hired this many times because Soham Parekh had been in conversations with at least 55 companies about jobs and had been hired and paid by at least 19 of them, according to a Soham tracker somebody put up in the wake of the story, the website attempted to track the total number of days he'd worked at each job, which ranged from just three at Ponder in June of 2025 to 250 at Command AI in 2022. Most of the evidence came from replies to Sahael's original post, which means that the data set is very likely incomplete. Those numbers, if anything, are probably low.

[Emma Siminoff]

Like this is a thing people do. The Reddit overemployed is very famous and it's full of people working two to three jobs. But the point is that you join big companies that work remotely. He was running small companies that worked in person a lot of the time. Huge flaw in the plan.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon the Weekly and I'm Josh Dean. This week the bizarre tale of the so called most famous engineer in the world, a coder from India who just couldn't stop taking jobs. You're listening to Chameleon the Weekly. One of the founders who popped into that now infamous Twitter thread was Dhruv Amin, an ex Google guy whose startup Create makes an AI agent known as Anything. He hired Soham as engineer number five as his company ramped up development. Soham had come recommended by a recruiter Dhruv trusted and crushed one of their tests. Soham accepted, told Dhruv he had a trip planned, then Went dark for a week, which Dhruv admitted was strange. But he ultimately surfaced and texted that he was excited to start the following Monday.

[Emma Siminoff]

It was an in person position. Right after they hire him, he's like, I'm sick.

[Josh Dean]

As in literally the first day that Monday.

[Emma Siminoff]

And they're like, okay, can we send you your laptop so that you can start doing some work if you feel better? And he's like, yeah, of course. Send someone address to send it to. The address was a co working space in sf. He told them he was in New York. It's also not an apartment.

[Josh Dean]

Dhruv thought this was weird, but maybe Soham had it sent there so a friend could grab it. Dhruv was hopeful he cut Soham some slack.

[Emma Siminoff]

He starts not doing a ton of work. They go on his GitHub account and they see that he's updating other code bases.

[Josh Dean]

For those of you who don't know, GitHub is a kind of online nexus where developers store, write and work on code together. Think of it like Google Docs combined with Slack, but for programmers. And the key thing is that it's pretty open and transparent because a lot of companies share code. Engineers also like to brag about their work and get credited. So if someone is working on code for multiple companies, it's not really hard to spot that, especially if the person isn't being sneaky.

[Emma Siminoff]

So they're like, okay, he's doing work, he's just not doing work for us.

[Josh Dean]

Some of Soham's work on GitHub was for sync, a startup that just happened to work out of the co working space where he'd had the laptop shipped. A coincidence? Dhruv and his co founder called and confronted Soham. Are you still working for Sink? Just be honest and we'll move on. He denied it, promised to do better. Dhruv was relieved for about a day because Soham got sick again. Told them that he'd just been diagnosed with a chronic condition and that medication was wrecking his sleep. To make matters worse, he was supposedly awaiting final approval of his O1 visa and was terrified that losing this job could cause him to lose was a cascade of sad trombones that put them on the back foot. So they gave him another chance, only to be disappointed again. The work when Soham did it was lackluster.

[Emma Siminoff]

They stormed down to this co working space and they're like, do you guys know Soham? And they're like, oh yeah, he's sick today. So he actually had his company laptop for another company shipped to his second.

[Josh Dean]

Job, Dhruv called Soham for a second time to flat out ask him if he was indeed still working at Sync, and he denied it for a second time. But the founders had enough. They fired him. Incredibly, that very same day, Sync released a video announcing its Employee of the Month. That employee, Soham Parek Dhruv, lamented the weeks lost on an engineer he'd hoped would be a key member of the startup team. He said it was embarrassing until he saw the thread and realized he was far from alone. I was pissed, he wrote, then impressed. Still not sure how he pulled it off for so long with in person startups with long hours, but appreciated the hustle. Hope he had a good reason. Feels like a stressful way to make money. Also a terrible way, because working multiple jobs for very short periods of time, all the while alienating key executives of a fairly small community seems like a half baked plan. Margot puzzled over this too.

[Emma Siminoff]

A lot of these companies didn't get their laptops back, so he's probably just got a stack of them. He must have so many at this point. Maybe that's the whole scam.

[Josh Dean]

She's joking, obviously, but Margot has thought a lot about this question.

[Emma Siminoff]

The why when you join a startup, they might offer you different packages, right? Where you might get a higher salary but lower equity. In his case, he almost always picked higher equity, lower salary, which is like particularly crazy because if you get fired within the first month, you don't get any of that equity.

[Josh Dean]

The how, she says, is a lot easier to answer.

[Emma Siminoff]

A lot of times he was like founding engineer or within the first 10 hires. Those are startups that are really desperate for engineering talent and like engineering talent fast, right? They don't have a ton of Runway. And then I think he was also very enamored with sort of the mythology of Silicon Valley.

[Josh Dean]

You might expect a guy who'd been widely exposed for working multiple jobs, who had upset and or embarrassed enough founders to fill a pickleball league, might just lay low, retreat to India, just find some honest work and do it well. Not Soham. He did not lay low for long because he seemingly couldn't resist the pull of appearing on podcasts. First on July 2025 was the popular Silicon Valley show TVPN, hosted by John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, two well coiffed tech bros who wore white shirts and white blazers. For their special guest, Soham popped remotely onto the screen in a frame that was cropped more tightly so that his head was twice the size of theirs. He wore A red T shirt and looked very young.

[Soham Parekh (Interview Segment)]

Obviously I would want to like, preface with saying, like, I'm not proud of what I've done. That's not something that I endorse either. But you know, no one really likes to work 140 hours a week. Right. But I had to do this kind of out of necessity. Like I was in extremely, like, dire financial circumstances.

[Josh Dean]

Soham was unwilling to take that case a step further to get into the details of his dire circumstances. But these hosts seemed impressed with his work. Rather than pressing him on the lies or his motivations, they seemed to want to hack his scam, to know how he kept it all balanced.

[John Coogan or Jordy Hayes]

You're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format. It pulls people in, it shows, it shows your personality, it shows that you care about coding. And I think that helps a lot as well.

[Emma Siminoff]

They didn't push him a ton. If anything, the whole interview was about, did you create spreadsheets to track your capital flow and the churn of each job? It was a very, very Silicon Valley brains interview.

[Josh Dean]

Maybe the guy who fooled so many startups had important data that could be mined to help other startups.

[Soham Parekh (Interview Segment)]

So I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is actually when I was running into issues. I had deferred my grad school admit and did like an online degree, but basically did not have enough essentially like, you know, just to get out of the situation I was in.

[Josh Dean]

It was puzzling, unsatisfying, but I'm also just going to admit it. Soham came across as sweet, innocent. It was hard watching that to dislike the guy. The hosts clearly fell under the same spell. They did ultimately ask one very obvious question. If Soham was indeed in dire financial straits, why not just be honest and ask for more money or the freedom to take a night job? Founders, especially desperate ones, might be open minded. His response was that it wasn't really about money. He did it for the love of the game. But that doesn't really jibe with the idea that he had to take multiple jobs out of desperation. Being greedy and being desperate are two different motivators for needing more money. But in both cases, it is about money. You can almost predict where the host would take it next.

[John Coogan or Jordy Hayes]

So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now and how can you turn this into a win?

[Josh Dean]

These two hosts, celebrants of Silicon Valley, they seem to buy into the old adage that all publicity is good publicity.

[John Coogan or Jordy Hayes]

I think you're going to Bring a lot of marketing value to the new company you're joining.

[Emma Siminoff]

It's also very Silicon Valley that the only interview he did was this podcast that's very like Bro y and Cloudy because they didn't press him on anything. So we really don't know why he did this. From founders I talked to, at one point he said that his fiance left him. Another one said, I think his grandma died. We don't have an answer as to why he was so desperate to do these jobs. It's a sad thing because he was part of basically the founding team of a lot of these companies and I think it just was like a bummer for morale. Yeah, some of them were very, I think, embarrassed.

[Josh Dean]

TVPN wasn't even Soham Parekh's only podcast visit. He also stopped by a show called Sing in the usa, hosted by a young Indian immigrant with a pompadour and a mocha colored leather jacket who'd been chronicling his studies and work since coming to America.

[Singh]

Today we have Soham here, the most famous software engineer in the world and most famous, most talked about in Silicon Valley. You've been called everything from genius to a scammer. How do you introduce yourself to someone who has never heard about you?

[Soham Parekh]

I mean, I usually just say, hey, you know, my name is Soham. I'm an engineer. There's this famous line from my email that went viral like, I don't have a life. You know, that's what I do all day. That's usually my go to intro as well. Like, that's how I talk about myself, myself in general. But yeah, I guess at this point the moniker I'm using is everyone's favorite founding engineer.

[Josh Dean]

In this appearance, however, we got some of the backstory, or at least a version. Soham was telling that day that he grew up in Mumbai and wasn't very athletic. That he fell into coding after a search for an activity that actually fit him and he loved it. It felt like a gift.

[Soham Parekh]

Once I started with it, I realized that this is crazy that someone can pay me to do this. Like, it felt like a game to me. Like, I want to learn everything that is in existence because everything is just so crazy exciting for me.

[Josh Dean]

Soham called Covid the luckiest thing that happened to me because he no longer had obligations to be anywhere. He took classes, wrote papers and did some fellowships. Most of all, he devoured code. He claimed to have been accepted to Georgia Tech and even went there for graduate school, at least for a time. It's on his resume problem is that seems not to be true. He never did go to Georgia Tech. Singh asked him about this, sort of.

[Singh]

So the dates you make up for Georgia Tech 2020-2022 is false. We can say that you knew all the concepts you were learning from Georgia Tech, but you did not go there.

[Soham Parekh]

Yeah, I mean, it's not false. That would have been my ear if I would have gone, which is why I put it in the cv, just so that I could have conversations with people I was interviewing that, hey, I'm doing a part time master's program, a.

[Josh Dean]

Part time master's program without actually being in the master's program.

[Soham Parekh]

And, you know, in that conversation, like, you know, it came out that I was working at two places. I got, you know, founders from Synthesia reached out to command bar founders, and then they candidly asked me that, you know, what is going on here? And so what I instead told them is I was very excited to build both the companies and I did not want to pick one.

[Josh Dean]

Soam told Singh that he'd worked maximum two jobs at a time, which seems dubious based on the anecdotal evidence unleashed on Twitter.

[Soham Parekh]

I keep saying this, that if there was a parallel universe where my financial circumstances were better, I would start my own company. Unfortunately for me, the risk appetite for starting a company and potentially not paying yourself is not something that I can go through right now.

[Josh Dean]

And so just working makes sense. Getting the best job possible, but multiple.

[Emma Siminoff]

Jobs, it is not a rational scam. This is not the way he could have made the most money, you know.

[Josh Dean]

So what was Soham Parekh actually up to? We'll chase that answer after the break.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

Chameleon, Chameleon.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon Weekly. One key to understanding the mystique around Soham Parekh, especially what seems to me to be the very confusing, almost admiration from many people in the tech community, is that he represents a kind of hustle and grind among engineers that is not ostracized. It's celebrated most openly in a popular subreddit known as overemployed.

[Emma Siminoff]

Overemployed is something that picked up a lot of steam during COVID when jobs were becoming remote. And these people realized that a lot of these big companies, maybe you're not working a full 40 hours a week, maybe you can get it done in 30 and 20, maybe even 40, but you're willing to work 80. And so they would get a second job, not tell the first job about it.

[Josh Dean]

Our overemployed sprung up in 2021 and is summed up like this. Work multiple jobs during the same 40 hours. Reach Financial freedom workers, many of them software engineers, exchange stories and intel on how best to manage multiple jobs, including when and how to stay off camera for meetings, how to deal with employer spyware that monitors your work and whereabouts, and how to deal with the risk of, quote, overlapping contractors who might meet you at two or more different jobs.

[Emma Siminoff]

It's a crazy Reddit thread because you go through and they're giving each other tips and there's a whole community of people that are getting away with this right now.

[Josh Dean]

Getting away with it implies, I guess, wrongdoing, and certainly there's an undercurrent of secrecy. But the broader idea that an engineer could work two or more jobs, it's fairly widely held out there in tech world. So widely held that a guy at Stanford named Igor Denisov Blanc, who researches software engineer productivity, started paying closer attention.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

Initially, when I would see this kind of stuff, meaning people working multiple jobs and whatnot, I would think, wow, this is, this is quite normal. I mean, I have friends who do that. Maybe it's not two full time jobs, it's kind of one full time and one part time. There's a whole community dedicated to it. And so I thought that it was just kind of normal. But then when the Soham thing came to surface and that was like an extreme case, right, Most people don't have, you know, 15 jobs at the same time. They hold maybe couple or so. Then I started looking through our data and saw that, hey, yeah, this is, you know, actually there's empirical proof that this happens quite often, actually.

[Josh Dean]

It's particularly common, he says, in software engineering for good reason, because your work.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

Output requires sometimes less collaboration than in other jobs, number one. And number two is also harder to measure. And you can kind of like very independently work on your assigned tasks. And then there's not that pressure of having to collaborate real time with people.

[Josh Dean]

It also obviously became much easier after Covid with the rise of remote work. And the primary motive, obviously is money. Engineers are hackers by nature. They fetishize efficiency and optimization. You could hear this in the conversation with Soham on that podcast. The entire point of overemployed is how to work more to earn more.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

Let's say you work one job and your after tax income is $100,000 a year. And so you might spend 60,000 of those 100 in living, which means you are saving maybe 40, right? But if your income now doubles to 200 and you have the same living expenses, you're spending 60 out of the 200. So your savings improved from 40,000 to 140,000, which means you're able to save a lot more and therefore can accrue more.

[Soham Parekh]

We.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

And then if you combine it with like I've talked to some people who are holding multiple jobs, they will, you know, have multiple properties, mortgage them. Like they will kind of build their lives on top of their strategy of being overemployed. So it's definitely the big reason for why they do it as financial.

[Josh Dean]

Igor had of course paid close attention to the Soham story.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

I think what was happening is that it usually takes one or two months for someone to catch up on whether someone is like there's a ramp up period for an employee, right? And what Sohan was doing was simply living off of those ramp up periods. And basically Instead of holding 15 jobs for two years, every job, right, where it's impossible to do in a one year period, he would always be applying and onboarding and offboarding from different jobs at the same time. And that's how he was able to increase his, let's call it concurrent paychecks from 1 or 2 to whatever it was, 5 or 10 or 15.

[Josh Dean]

So it did make some financial sense to a guy who studies this phenomenon.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

Of course it takes a lot of mental pressure to do this because you're juggling a lot. And at the same time companies were like, well, he's new, let's have him on board. Maybe he's dealing with some real life situations. And that's basically how I think he was able to stretch out these onboarding periods. We actually have worked with one company to measure Soham's performance and it was just not very good. I'm confident that he was just not doing a ton of work at any company, just kind of navigating between those buckets.

[Josh Dean]

I just have trouble accepting this argument that it makes any kind of objective sense.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

But at the same time it is one of the ways in which you can increase your income by 5x rather than by 2 or 3x. Right. And so if that's strictly what you're after and you're okay with sacrificing your, I suppose, mental health being and ethics and reputation, then I guess from that perspective it is a way to do it.

[Josh Dean]

Soham also seems to exist on the boundary of another, even more to me anyway, surprising kind of Silicon Valley employee that Igor has studied, the ghost engineer.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

So a ghost engineer is an engineer whose full time role is to Write software. So that person is not a manager or that person is not working with clients or doing sales. They're a full time engineer. And despite this, their performance sits at somewhere like 10% of what a median engineer would deliver. And so they basically either don't work at all or pretend to work and collect a paycheck. And I think there is a big overlap between ghost engineers and overemployed engineers. But then there's also people who are ghost engineers who just simply choose to use their free time in other capacities, like, you know, just leisure stuff. And I think that ghost engineers are a lot more prevalent, at least what we see in the data, than overemployed engineers.

[Josh Dean]

A lot more prevalent. Are we all doing this work thing wrong? Igor and his colleagues have estimated the percentage of engineers in this category based on the data set available to them, and the number is pretty staggering.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

It's like 9.5%, more or less a hair under that. And that's across more than 100,000 engineers. So we're quite confident in the number. And maybe it's 7% for some companies and 11% for other companies, but that's still roughly 1 in 10, 1 in 12 engineers who's a severe underperformer.

[Josh Dean]

Call me naive, and I've certainly worked with plenty of underperformers, but 10% of engineers doing basically no work seems like a lot of.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

To be clear, this is across probably any white collar job, not just software engineers. I think if we were to look at marketing or something, it would be also a very similar picture.

[Josh Dean]

Igor's results made a splash. He got a lot of feedback. Some criticized his methodology, accusing him of a very limited data set or of helping to pave the way for companies to replace humans with AI. Others wanted to confess, in a way, they were among these ghost engineers.

[Igor Denisov Blanc]

You know, when people would reach out, I was just curious why they were doing it, how they were pulling this off, what was their incentive. The typical story was like, well, look, I used to be a high performer. I used to care. But then for whatever reason, I hold some kind of grudge with my company, with my team, with my boss, I started to disengage. And as I disengaged, I saw that I could get away with it. And so then the more I disengaged, like, with time, nothing would happen. And so eventually I got to a point where I was just hardly doing anything, collecting the same paycheck. And then I was like, well, why would I work harder for a team, a company, a mission that I don't believe in.

[Josh Dean]

That may be true of many people. I can squint and see how that makes some sense as a way of justifying what is objectively unethical behavior, but it also feels convenient. And I'm pretty sure plenty of people who work ghost jobs are doing it simply because they can. And what about Soham, the man who flamed bright and became for a few days something of a legend in Silicon Valley? The self proclaimed most famous engineer in the world. Where is he today? He's back at work, of course.

[Emma Siminoff]

He's at an AI company. And I emailed them and I was like, is this real? Because again, he is a compulsive liar. They sent me like an email statement and they were like, we stand behind SOHOB, which again, in Silicon Valley, like second chances are abundant. I mean, Adam Newman, the WeWork founder that was kind of notoriously insane and got basically kicked out of the company, and Andreessen Horowitz, a very, very important venture firm, gave him hundreds of millions of dollars for a new project. There's a lot of grace in Silicon Valley.

[Josh Dean]

What the host of the TBPN podcast had said was apparently true. At least one company didn't mind the noise.

[Soham Parekh (Interview Segment)]

I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next, working with a company called Darwin. They are essentially building a new AI driven video platform. This is the only thing I'm going to focus on. They've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove.

[Josh Dean]

At least one employer still saw plenty of potential in Soham, in spite of his misdeeds, maybe even because of them. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's written and hosted by me, Josh Dean, and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Themed by Ewin lytramuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email [e-mail] or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Emma Siminoff]

I think Chuck would approve.