What Happened?
A developer named Soham Parekh somehow got hired by 14 different Y Combinator startups at the same time. All remote jobs. All fired him within 3 weeks when they found out.
Tech Twitter is going absolutely crazy.
The Internet's Reaction
Team Hero: "This guy exposed how broken our hiring is! Legend!"
Team Villain: "He's a fraud who stole jobs from real developers!"
Team Impressed: "Best interviewer of all time. Should become a consultant."
The memes are everywhere. People joking about VCs realizing half their portfolio hired the same guy.
But Here's the Real Problem
Everyone's missing the point. This isn't about one guy gaming the system.
It's about how broken tech hiring is.
Think About It:
- If one person fooled 14 companies, what does that say about our interviews?
- Why are we all hiring for the same jobs?
- How did nobody catch this earlier?
The Uncomfortable Truth
Our industry has created a system where:
- Good at interviews = Gets hired
- Good at actual work = Doesn't matter
- LeetCode skills > Real coding skills
- Everyone chases the same "rockstar" developers
Soham just played the game better than everyone else.
What This Really Means
For Companies:
Your hiring process is probably broken if one person can trick you this easily.
For Developers:
We're all part of this broken system every time we grind LeetCode instead of building real projects.
For the Industry:
Maybe we need to admit that most tech interviews are just expensive theater.
The Simple Fix
Stop hiring based on:
- How well someone can solve puzzles on a whiteboard
- Whether they went to the "right" school
- How good they are at telling rehearsed stories
Start hiring based on:
- Can they actually build things?
- Do they solve real problems?
- Will they stick around and do the work?
My Hot Takes
- Soham did us a favor by showing how broken hiring is
- Remote work isn't the problem - bad management is
- Most tech interviews are completely useless for predicting job performance
- Half these startups probably don't need to exist if they're all hiring for identical roles
Everyone's arguing about whether this guy is a hero or villain.
Wrong question.
The right question is: Why is our hiring so bad that this was even possible?
What do you think?
- Hero or villain?
- Have you seen broken hiring processes?
- How would you fix tech interviews?
Let's discuss this properly instead of just making memes.
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