Chameleon: "Engineering to Deceive – The Talented Coder Who Just Keeps Getting Jobs"
Podcast: Chameleon | Audiochuck & Campside Media
Host: Josh Dean
Date: January 29, 2026
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.
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]
- Tips exchanged for avoiding detection: muting cameras, managing employer spyware, overlapping schedules.
- 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]
- The company stood by Soham, as is often the case in Silicon Valley’s culture of second chances.
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]
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
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.
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?