The 10x Engineer Shaking Up the IT World

On July 2, 2025, Mixpanel and Playground-AI founder Suhail Doshi posted a hard-hitting public warning on Twitter. He cautioned other founders about "a guy named Soham Parekh" who was reportedly working three or four full-time jobs simultaneously, collecting hefty paychecks while delivering little or no code. Doshi had fired Parekh just a week after hiring him, but months later, upon seeing that the scheme continued, decided to expose him publicly.

Almost immediately, other startup leaders joined the thread with their own “me too” stories. Founders from Lindy, Fleet AI, Antimetal, and other companies shared that they too had hired—and quickly fired—the same engineer. What seemed like an isolated red flag turned out to be a pattern: Parekh was hopping from AI startup to AI startup, stacking salaries that could have totaled over a million dollars a year. 

Within twenty-four hours, #SohamGate was trending. Engineers compared notes, founders traded Slack screenshots, and memes flooded timelines.

Too Good to Be True

How could a developer make it through so many interviews? 

According to all reports, Soham Parekh interviewed like a 10x engineer: flawless résumé, perfect coding challenge, and a charismatic product pitch. Several CEOs later admitted they were "blown away" during the selection process.

One such company was Lindy—Parekh nailed the interview, but had a net negative impact after two weeks on the job. At another startup, founders noticed he logged about 3 total hours his first week. The excuses for his lack of productivity varied, from sudden illnesses to the claim that a military drone strike had damaged his home (India-Pakistan conflict; it was a lie).

The biggest clue came when two YC founders compared notes and discovered the same engineer was “on sick leave” at one company while merging code at another. When the IP logs showed Parekh connecting from Mumbai (and not California as he'd claimed), and a company laptop sent to a fake US address was returned, the scam became undeniable.

Warning Signs and Revelations

Doshi's public tweet triggered a domino effect:

• Pragmatic Engineer published a detailed case study, "The 10x Overemployed Engineer", tracking at least 20 startups linked to Parekh.
• Parekh himself gave a confessional interview, admitting that he had been juggling multiple jobs since 2022 and sometimes working 140-hour weeks out of "financial desperation."

Curiously, amid the backlash, a few contrarians offered Parekh a second chance. San Francisco-based Darwin Studios announced they would hire him as founding engineer, arguing that a public reputation to repair is the best productivity incentive.

NOTE: I have found tweets and newspaper articles that claim this is true, but I haven't seen any statement from darwin_studios about it.

The Tech World's Reaction

Within our world, reactions were all over the map.

• Founders: Furious about the broken trust, many promised stricter reference checks, regular in-person onboarding, and a "trust but verify" approach to supervising remote staff.
• Engineers: Mixed opinions. Some called Parekh a fraud who damages their community; others see him as striking back when companies outsource and exploit low costs in some countries, so it's only fair that someone from those regions takes advantage of such companies.
• The Internet at large: Concerned these incidents will be used to justify return-to-office mandates or intrusive monitoring. And, of course, the memes.

A Warning for Remote Work

The Soham Parekh saga is unusual, but it crystallizes three uncomfortable truths:

• Trust is fragile. Remote work lives or dies on good faith. When a single bad actor abuses that trust, entire cohorts of honest remote workers suffer the reputational hit.
• Fast hiring has hidden costs. In the AI talent race, startups often skip in-depth references or background checks. Parekh exploited precisely that.
• 10x developers. Tech culture loves the “10x productivity” mythos, but the pressure to appear superhuman can incentivize shortcuts—sometimes with catastrophic results.

Don't panic. Remote work is still overwhelmingly successful; the vast majority of employees are honest and most companies benefit from distributed teams. But the industry needs to toughen its vetting, encourage transparency about outside commitments, and remember that integrity always beats opportunists in the end.