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

January 29, 2026·28 min·2 clips

Stanford researcher Igor Denisov-Blank found that roughly 9.5% of engineers across more than 100,000 workers do essentially no work — about one in ten.

It starts with a warning. Suhail Doshi, founder of Playground AI, posts that a guy named Soham Parekh in India has been working at three to four startups at once and preying on YC companies. The replies come fast. Founder after founder describes the same rough pattern: hire him, let him go, then wonder if he was working somewhere else at the same time. One trial is canceled. Another founder says Parekh had been doing this for years and working at more than four startups at any given moment. The rumor spreads. Margot McCall of Business Insider notices, and a blunt post becomes a wider story about startup embarrassment. Then Parekh comes off charming. On a podcast, he sounds sweet and almost innocent, which makes him harder to write off. The obvious question lands. If he was truly desperate for money, why not ask for more pay or permission to work at night? His answer muddies it. He says it was not really about money, but for the love of the game, a line that sits badly beside desperation. The host stays skeptical. Greed and desperation are different motives, but both still point back to money when the behavior is taking multiple paid jobs. Silicon Valley moves fast. The podcast hosts seem ready to treat scandal as marketing value and ask how Parekh might turn the attention into a win. That says plenty. The episode is less about making Parekh a cartoon villain than watching a whole ecosystem explain him away. The motive stays blurry. Founders mention claims about a fiancee leaving, a grandma dying, and other private pressures, but none of it answers the main question. The damage is practical. Some companies treated him like part of a founding team, so the deception bruised morale and embarrassed founders. The ending stays open. Parekh keeps turning up in interviews, including Sing in the USA, while the real reason for the scheme remains just out of reach.

As heard by us

A sharp Silicon Valley true-crime-adjacent story about alleged overemployment, evasive charm, and an industry eager to spin scandal into opportunity.

Chameleon tracks the public pile-on around Soham Parekh, the coder Suhail Doshi accused of juggling three or four startup jobs while lying to founders along the way.

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Why you'd press play

A viral startup pile-on with the biggest motive still unresolved.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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