Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lo and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retail crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. Last summer, Suhail Dochi, the founder of the Bay Area startup called Playground AI, fired up the machine, formerly known as Twitter, and wrote the following post. There's a guy named Suhail Perek in India who works at three to four startups at the same time. He's been praying on YC companies and more, beware. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying, scamming people. He hasn't stopped, a year later, no more excuses. Within minutes, the replies began to rain down. They continued throughout the afternoon and into the next day. Other founder stories all saying some version of the same thing. We hired him and promptly let him go. The crazy thing is we're fully in person in SF. He was in our office for one day before a series of lies about why he couldn't come in as he was for sure working at other companies simultaneously. Absolutely unhinged behavior. We just signed him up for our work trial next week, saw this tweet, Canceled Worktrial. He has been doing this for years and works at more than four startups at any given time. The threat grew, the tech rumor mill caught fire, and industry reporters like Margot McCall of Business Insider spotted the smoke billowing up. They went super viral and the replies were basically flooded with founders. A bunch of them like currently had him hired, which I'm sure was trippy for them to see other founders being like we are currently employing this man. It felt like a surreal and only in Silicon Valley storyline. A software engineer who somehow simultaneously worked for, and in some cases screwed over, multiple startups at once. Who somehow secured in-person gigs in San Francisco despite apparently residing in India. Honestly, it felt like a plot line from Silicon Valley. The Mike Judge HBO sitcom that made such great fun of Bay Area Tech culture. The story was very similar from founders to founder. He would often come in for in-person interviews so they would watch him code. So he wasn't using AI coders, he wasn't cheating on their coding tests. They were super impressed with him. He was obviously very talented to get all these jobs. This engineer, Soham, had an MO. He'd come in for a few days like below the amount of the water would be really great. And then basically disappear, kind of bread crumb them, respond sometimes, get them code sometimes. A lot of times he's founders would catch him like they'd kind of realize something was up and he would often get fired pretty early on. One founder noted in the thread that hiring and firing Soham was a real blow to his company's momentum. Quote, honestly one of my lowest points. And he saw this in prompt to Twitter thread, founders helping founders as a god send for his tribe. Sahel is helping so many companies from future headaches and hopefully encouraging others to avoid such bad behavior he wrote. Obviously, Soham's talent was real. You might fool a founder or two, but an actual fraud of an engineer, someone just playing apart, wasn't getting hired this many times. Because Soham Perak had been in conversations with at least 55 companies about jobs and had been hired and paid by at least 19 of them, according to a Soham tracker somebody put up in the wake of the story. The website attempted to track the total number of days he'd worked at each job, which rained from just three at Ponder in June of 2025 to 250 at Command AI in 2022. Most of the evidence came from replies to Sahel's original post, which means that the data set is very likely incomplete. Those numbers, if anything, are probably low. Like, this is a thing people do. The Reddit over employed is very famous and it's full of people working two to three jobs, but the point is that you join big companies that work remotely. He was joining small companies that worked in person a lot of the time. Huge flaw on the plan. This is Camillean, the weekly, and I'm Josh Deane. This week, the bizarre tale of the so-called most famous engineer in the world, a coder from India who just couldn't stop taking jobs. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. As these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers, are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck Now, wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Camillean, the weekly. One of the founders who popped into that now infamous Twitter thread was Drew Amin. An ex-Google guy who start up Create makes an AI agent known as anything. He hired Sohom as engineer number five as his company ramped up development. Sohom had come recommended by a recruiter Drew trusted and quote crushed one of their tests. Sohom accepted, told Drew if he had a trip planned, then went dark for a week, which Drew admitted was strange. But he ultimately surfaced and texted that he was excited to start the following Monday. It was an in-person position. Right after they hire him, he's like I'm sick. He's in literally the first day that Monday. And they're like okay, it can be sent you your laptops so that you can start doing some work if you feel better. And he's like yeah, of course, send someone a dress to send it to. The address was a co-working space in SF. He told them he was in New York. It's also not an apartment. Drew thought this was weird, but maybe Sohom had it sent there so a friend could grab it. Drew was hopeful. He cut Sohom some slack. He starts not doing a ton of work. They go on his GitHub account and they see that he's updating other code bases. For those of you who don't know, GitHub is a kind of online nexus where developers store, write and work on code together. Think of it like Google Docs combined with Slack, but for programmers. And a key thing is that it's pretty open and transparent because a lot of companies share code. Engineers also like to brag about their work and get credited. So someone is working on code for multiple companies. It's not really hard to spot that, especially if the person isn't being sneaky. So they're like, okay, he's doing work. He's just not doing work for us. Some of Sohom's work on GitHub was for sync. A startup that just happened to work out of the co-working space where he'd had the laptop shipped. A coincidence? Drew and his co-founder called and confronted Sohom. Are you still working for sync? Just be honest and we'll move on. He denied it, promised to do better. Drew was relieved for about a day because Sohom got sick again, told them that he'd just been diagnosed with a chronic condition and that medication was wrecking his sleep. To make matters worse, he was supposedly awaiting final approval of his O1 visa and was terrified that losing this job could cause him to lose it. It was a cascade of sad trombones that put them on the back foot so they gave him another chance, only to be disappointed again. To work, when Sohom did it, was lackluster. They stormed down to this co-working space and they're like, do you guys know Sohom? And they're like, oh yeah, he's sick today. So he actually had his company laptop for another company shipped to his second job. Drew called Sohom for a second time to flat out ask him if he was indeed still working at sync. And he denied it for a second time. But the founders had enough. They fired him. Incredibly, that very same day, sync released a video announcing its employee of the month. That employee, Sohom Perak. Drew lamented the week's loss on an engineer he'd hoped would be a key member of the startup team. He said it was embarrassing until he saw the thread and realized he was far from alone. I was pissed, he wrote, then impressed. Still not sure how he pulled it off for so long with in-person startups with long hours, but appreciated the hustle. Hope he had a good reason. Feels like a stressful way to make money. Also, a terrible way. Because working multiple jobs for very short periods of time, all the while alienating key executives of a fairly small community seems like a half baked plan. Margot puzzled over this too. A lot of these companies didn't get their laptops back, so he's probably just got a stack of them. He must have so many at this point. Maybe that's the whole scale. He's joking, obviously, but Margot has thought a lot about this question, the why. When you join a startup, they might offer you different packages, right? Where you might get a higher salary, but lower equity. In his case, he was always picked higher equity, lower salary, which is like particularly crazy because if you get fired within the first month, you don't get any of that equity. The how she says is a lot easier to answer. A lot of times he was like founding engineer or within the first 10 hires. Those are startups that are really desperate for engineering talent and engineering talent fast, right? They don't have a ton of runway. And then I think he was also very enamored with sort of the mythology of Silicon Valley. You might expect a guy who'd been widely exposed for working multiple jobs who had upset and or embarrassed enough founders to fill a pickleball league might just lay low, retreat to India, just find some honest work and do it well. But so, he did not lay low for long because he seemingly couldn't resist the pull of appearing on podcasts. First, on July 2025 was the popular Silicon Valley show, TVPN, hosted by John Cougan and Jordy Hayes, two well-quaffed tech bros and wore white shirts and white blazers for their special guest. So, hopped remotely onto the screen in a frame that was cropped more tightly so that his head was twice the size of theirs. He wore a red t-shirt and looked very young. Obviously, I would want to be free-faced with saying, like, I'm not proud of what I've done. That's not something that I endorse either. But, you know, no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, right? But I had to do this kind of out of necessity. Like, I was in extremely dire financial circumstances. So, hop was unwilling to take that case a step further to get into the details of his dire circumstances. But these hosts seemed impressed with his work. Rather than pressing him on the lies or his motivations, they seemed to want to hack his game to know how he kept it all balanced. You're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format. It pulls people in. It shows your personality. It shows that you care about, you know, coding. And I think that helped a lot as well. I mean, they didn't push him a ton. If anything, the whole interview was about like, did you create spreadsheets to track your like capital flow and the churn of each job? Like, it was a very, very Silicon Valley brains interview. Maybe the guy who fooled so many startups had important data that could be mine to help other startups. So I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is actually when I was running into issues. I had deferred my grad school admit and, you know, did like an online degree. But basically, you know, did not have like enough, essentially like, you know, just to get out of the situation I was in. It was puzzling, unsatisfying. But I'm also just going to admit it. So-hom came across as sweet, innocent. It was hard watching that to dislike the guy. The hosts clearly fell under the same spell. They did ultimately ask one very obvious question. If So-hom was indeed in dire financial straits, why not just be honest and ask for more money, or the freedom to take a night job? Founders, especially desperate ones, might be open-minded. His response was that it wasn't really about money. He did it for the love of the game. But that doesn't really jive with the idea that he had to take multiple jobs out of desperation. Being greedy and being desperate are two different motivators for needing more money. But in both cases, it is about money. You can almost predict where the hosts would take it next. So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now and how can you turn this into a win? These two hosts, celebrants of Silicon Valley, they seem to buy into the old adage that all publicity is good publicity. I think you're going to bring a lot of marketing value to the new company you're joining. It's also very Silicon Valley that the only interview he did was this podcast that's very like, Broey and like Cloudy because they didn't press him on anything. We really don't know why he did this. From founders I talked to, at one point he said that his fiance left him. Another one said, I think his grandma died. We don't have an answer as to why he was so desperate to do these jobs. It's a sad thing because he was part of basically the founding team of a lot of these companies. And I think it just was like a bummer for morale. Yeah, some of them were very, I think, embarrassed. TPPN wasn't even so harm Perrex only podcast visit. He also stopped by a show called Sing in the USA hosted by a young Indian immigrant with a pompadour and a mocha-colored leather jacket who'd been chronicling his studies and work since coming to America. Today we have so home here, the most famous software engineer in the world and most famous most talked about in Silicon Valley. You've been called everything from genius to a scammer. How do you introduce yourself to someone who has never heard about you? I mean, I really just say, hey, you know, my MSO, I'm an engineer. There's a famous line from my email that went viral, like I don't have a life, you know, that's what I do all day. That's usually my go-to intro as well. Like that's how I talk about myself in general. But yeah, I guess at this point the moniker I'm using is everyone's favorite founding engineer. In this appearance, however, we got some of the back story. Or at least a version Sohom was telling that day that he grew up in Mumbai and wasn't very athletic, that he fell into coding after a search for an activity that actually fit him and he loved it. It felt like a gift. Once I started with it, I realized that this is crazy, that someone can pay me to do this, like it felt like a game to me, like I want to learn everything that is in existence because everything is just so crazy exciting for me. Sohom called COVID the luckiest thing that happened to me because he no longer had obligations to be anywhere. He took classes, wrote papers, and did some fellowships. Most of all, he devoured code. He claimed to have been accepted to Georgia Tech and even went there for graduate school, at least for a time. It's on his resume. Problem is, that seems not to be true. He never did go to Georgia Tech. Seeing asked him about this sort of. So the dates you make up for Georgia Tech 2020-2022 is false. We could say that you knew all the concepts you were learning from Georgia Tech, but you did not go there. Yeah, I mean, it's not false. That would have been my ear if I would have gone, which is I put it in the CV just so that I could have conversations with people. I was interviewing that, hey, I am doing a part-time master's program. A part-time master's program without actually being in the master's program. And in that conversation, it came out that I was working at two places. I got founders from Sinti Shari start to command by founders and then they can't really ask me what is going on here. And so what I instead told them is I was very excited to build both the companies and I did not want to pick one. So I'm told saying that it worked maximum two jobs at a time, which seems dubious based on the anecdotal evidence unleashed on Twitter. I keep saying this that if there was a parallel universe where my financial circumstances were better, I would start my own company. Unfortunately for me, the risk appetite for starting a company and potentially not paying yourself is not something that I can go through right now. And so just working makes sense. Getting the best job possible. But multiple jobs? It is not a rational scam. This is not the way he could have made the most money, you know? So what was Sohan Pirek actually up to? We'll chase that answer after the break. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Camillean Weekly. One key to understanding the mystique around Sohan Pirek, especially what seems to me to be the very confusing almost admiration for many people in the tech community is that he represents a kind of hustle and grind among engineers that is not ostracized. It's celebrated. Most openly in a popular subreddit known as over employed. Over employed is something that picked up a lot of steam during COVID when jobs were becoming remote and these people realize that a lot of these big companies. Maybe you're not working a full 40 hours a week. Maybe you can get it done in 30 and 20 maybe even 40 but you're willing to work 80 and so they would get a second job. Not tell the first job about it. Our backslash over employed sprung up in 2021 and is summed up like this. Work multiple jobs during the same 40 hours reach financial freedom. Workers many of them software engineers exchange stories and intel on how best to manage multiple jobs. Getting when and how to stay off camera for meetings. How to deal with employers by where that monitors your work and whereabouts. And how to deal with the risk of quote overlapping contractors who might meet you at two or more different jobs. It's a crazy run it through and they're giving each other tips and there's a whole community of people that are getting away with this right now. Getting away with it implies I guess wrongdoing and certainly there's an undercurrent of secrecy. But the broader idea that an engineer can work two or more jobs. It's fairly widely held out there in tech world. So widely held that a guy at Stanford named Igor Denisov Blank who researches software engineer productivity started paying closer attention. Initially when I would see this kind of stuff meaning people working multiple jobs and whatnot. I would think while this is just quite normal. I mean, I have friends who do that. Maybe it's not two full time jobs. It's kind of one full time and one part time. There's a whole community dedicated to it. And so I thought that it was just kind of normal. But then when the so ham thing came to surface and that was like an extreme case where most people don't have 15 jobs at the same time. They hold maybe a couple or so. Then I started looking through our data and saw that, hey, yeah, this is actually there's empirical proof that this happens quite often actually. It's particularly common he says in software engineering for good reason. Because your work outputs require sometimes less collaboration than another jobs. Number one and number two is also harder to measure. And you can kind of like very independently work on your assigned tasks. And then there's not that pressure having to collaborate real time with people. It also obviously became much easier after COVID with the rise of remote work. And the primary motive obviously is money. Engineers are hackers by nature. They fetishize efficiency and optimization. You could hear this in the conversation with SoHum on that podcast. The entire point of over employed is how to work more to earn more. Let's say you work one job and your after tax income is $100,000 a year. And so you might spend 60,000 of those 100 in living, which means you are saving maybe for it. But if your income now doubles to 200 and you have the same living expenses, you're spending 60 out of the 200 so your savings improved from 40,000 to 140,000, which means you're able to save a lot more and therefore a kind of a crew more wealth and then if you combine it with like I've talked to some people who are holding multiple jobs, they will have multiple properties, mortgage them. Like they will kind of build their lives on top of their strategy of being over employed. So it's definitely the big reason for why they do it as financial. Igor had of course paid close attention to the SoHum story. I think what was happening is that it usually takes one or two months for someone to catch up on whether someone is like there's a ramp up period for an employee, right? And what SoHun was doing was simply living up those ramp up periods and basically instead of kind of holding 15 jobs for two years, every job, right, where it's impossible to do. In a one year period, he would always be applying and onboarding and off boarding from different jobs at the same time. And that's how he was able to increase his, let's call it concurrent paychecks from one or two to whatever it was, five or ten or fifteen. So it did make some financial sense to a guy who studies this phenomenon. Of course, it takes a lot of mental pressure to do this because you're juggling a lot and at the same time companies were like, well, he's new. Let's have him on board. Maybe he's dealing with some real life situations. And that's basically how I think he was able to stretch out these on boarding periods. We actually have worked with one company to measure SoHun's performance and it was just not very good. Unconfidentity was just not doing a ton of work at any company. Just kind of navigating between those buckets. I just have trouble accepting this argument that it makes any kind of objective sense. But at the same time, it is one of the ways in which you can increase your income by five X rather than by two or three X, right? And so if that's strictly what you're after and you're okay with sacrificing your, I suppose, mental health being in ethics and reputation, then I guess from that perspective, it is a way to do it. SoHun also seems to exist on the boundary of another even more to me anyway, surprising kind of Silicon Valley employee that Igor has studied the Ghost Engineer. So a Ghost Engineer is an engineer whose full-time role is to write software. So a person is not a manager or that person is not working with clients or doing sales. They're full-time engineers. And despite this, their performance sits at some more like 10% of what a median engineer would deliver. And so they basically either don't work at all or pretend to work and collect the paycheck. And I think there's a big overlap between Ghost Engineers and over-employed engineers. But then there's also people who are Ghost Engineers who just simply choose to use their free time in other capacities like, you know, just leisure stuff. And I think that Ghost Engineers are a lot more prevalent, at least what we see in the data than over-employed engineers. A lot more prevalent. Are we all doing this work thing wrong? Igor and his colleagues have estimated the percentage of engineers in this category, based on the data set available to them. And the number is pretty staggering. It's like 9.5% more or less hair under that. And you know, that's across more than 100,000 engineers. So we're quite confident in the number and maybe it's 7% for some companies and 11% for other companies. But that's still roughly one in 10, one in 12 engineers who's a severe underperformer. Call me naive and I've certainly worked with plenty of underperformers, but 10% of engineers doing basically no work seems like a lot. To be clear, this is across probably any wide-collar job, not just software engineers. I think if we were to look at marketing or something, it would be also a very similar picture. Igor's results made a splash. He got a lot of feedback. Some criticized his methodology, accusing him of a very limited data set, or of helping to pave the way for companies to replace humans with AI. Others wanted to confess in a way. They were among these Ghost Engineers. You know, when people would reach out, I was just curious why they were doing it, how they were pulling this off, what was their incentive. The typical story was like, wow, look, I used to be a high performer, I used to care. But then for whatever reason, I hold some kind of grudge with my company, with my team, with my boss. I started to disengage. And as I disengaged, I saw that I could get away with it. And so then the more I disengaged, like with time, nothing would happen. And so eventually I got to a point where I was just hardly doing anything, collecting the same paycheck. And then I was like, well, why would I work harder for a team, a company, a mission that I don't believe in? That may be true of many people. I could squint and see how that makes some sense as a way of justifying what is objectively unethical behavior. But it also feels convenient. And I'm pretty sure plenty of people who work Ghost Jobs are doing it simply because they can. And what about Sohom, the man who flamed bright and became, for a few days, something of a legend in Silicon Valley, the self-proclaimed, most famous engineer in the world? Where is he today? He's back at work, of course. He's at an AI company and I emailed them. And I was like, is this real? Because again, he is a compulsive liar. They used to have me like an email statement and they were like, we stand behind Sohom. Which again, in Silicon Valley, like second chances are abundant. I mean, Adam Newman, the we work founder that was kind of notoriously insane and got basically kicked out of the company. And Andrew Sinorra, a very, very important venture firm, gave him hundreds of millions of dollars for a new project. There's a lot of grace in Silicon Valley. What the host of the TBPN podcast had said was apparently true. At least one company didn't mind the noise. I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next, working with a company called Darwin. They are essentially like building a new like AI driven video platform. This is the only thing I'm going to focus on. They've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove. At least one employer still saw plenty of potential in Sohom, in spite of his misdeeds. Maybe even because of them. Communion is a production of Campside Media and AudioChuck. It's written and hosted by me, Josh Dean, and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Simanov. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimack. Sound design by Ewin Leitermuen and Mark McAddom. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriatus, Matt Cher, and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow, and review Communion under favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. If you have any feedback tips or story ideas, you can email us at chameleonpod.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 2021 743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. I think Chuck would approve.
