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

Chameleon

Audiochuck | Campside Media

True Crime, Tv & Film, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.5 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When one tech founder tweets a warning about a seemingly prolific engineer named Soham Parekh, it sets off an avalanche. Turns out, Soham has been hired and paid by dozens of start-ups, sometimes working at several at once. He dazzled founders with coding tests, then vanished into a fog of excuses.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Campsite Media.
0:05.1	Hello?
0:06.2	What is, so, what do you want me to say?
0:08.7	Oh, it's just my.
0:10.4	Camillion.
0:11.3	Camillion Weekly.
0:14.7	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.
0:26.0	There's a guy named Soham Perak in India who works at three to four startups at the same time.
0:30.8	He's been praying on YC companies and more. Beware.
0:34.0	I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying, scamming people.
0:37.8	He hasn't stopped. A year later. No more excuses.
0:42.2	Within minutes, the replies began to rain down.
0:45.7	They continued throughout the afternoon and into the next day.
0:49.1	Other founder stories all saying some version of the same thing.
0:53.7	We hired him and promptly let him go.
0:56.0	The crazy thing is we're fully in person in SF.
0:59.0	He was in our office for one day before a series of lies about why he couldn't come in
1:03.0	as he was for sure working at other companies simultaneously.
1:06.0	Absolutely unhinged behavior.
1:09.0	We just signed him up for our work trial next week.
1:11.9	Saw this tweet, canceled work trial.
1:14.3	He has been doing this for years and works at more than four startups at any given time.
	...

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