A seemingly overemployed engineer has sparked a round of memes and self-reflection in tech this week.

Indian software engineer, Soham Parekh, was accused online by a founder this week of working at three to four startups simultaneously. The founder's X post set off a firestorm in the industry, with other founders chiming in to say they, too, hired — and fired — him.

Parekh appeared on the tech podcast "TBPN" on Thursday and confirmed he had juggled multiple jobs.

"I wanna preface by saying that I'm not proud of what I've done. That's not something that I endorse either," Parekh said. "No one really likes to work 140 hours a week, but I had to do this kind of out of necessity. I was in extremely dire financial circumstances."

Parekh spoke to "TBPN" hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays about why he chose to work for multiple startups at the same time and how he got hired.

On the podcast, he referred to himself as a "serial non-sleeper." He said that he did not hire a team of junior engineers to help him accomplish tasks at various jobs or use AI to get the work done. He said on the podcast that he worked for many of the companies prior to the boom in AI-assisted programming.

"This was not a business to me. Every company that I've worked with, I deeply cared about," Parekh added.Parekh did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The brouhaha started when Suhail Doshi, the founder of Playground AI, posted on X on Tuesday about a former software engineer who he said previously worked for his company. He accused Parekh of moonlighting for multiple startups.

Founders of multiple companies confirmed with BI that a man named Soham Parekh had worked for or interviewed with them. Several said they quickly realized he was overemployed and let him go.

Parekh did not discuss being fired on the podcast.

Igor Zalutski, the CEO of Digger, told BI that Parekh passed his interviews "with flying colors" and said the company was "super excited for him to start" before the hiring process was halted on June 30 because of a background check issue. He did not elaborate on the specifics.

"I think he's genuinely a brilliant engineer," Zalutski said, adding, "Soham seemed clearly one of the top 0.1%; anyone can learn to do coding puzzles, but very few can do technical problem solving entirely in their head, while keeping the user and business in mind."

Kevin Wu, the founder and CEO of Leaping AI, told BI that Parekh was employed by the company briefly, but was let go for "his underperformance on the job" and after they found out he was employed by other startups.

A spokesperson for Synthesia also confirmed to BI that Parekh was briefly employed at the company and said that part of the reason he was let go was that it suspected he was working other jobs.

Matt Parkhurst, the CEO of Antimetal, wrote on X that Parekh is "really smart and likable," but he was let go after the company found out about his other jobs. Antimetal did not immediately respond to a request for further information.

Though the timeline of when Parekh worked at which company is not entirely clear, a June 2021 blog post by Meta shows that Parekh was a WebXR contributor working on immersive AR/VR examples through the Major League Hacking (MLH) Fellowship at that time.

In California, where most of these startups are based, there is no law against working for multiple companies simultaneously, even if they are competitors. It's unclear what Parekh had agreed to in his contracts.

His job-juggling has sparked discussion around the phenomenon of similar overemployment.

"There are 1000s of Soham Parekhs we don't know about," Deedy Das, a principal at Menlo Ventures focused on AI investments, wrote on X. "To be clear, this is a complete non-issue if your employment contract is okay with it."

Overemployment grew in popularity during the pandemic, when some workers took advantage of fully remote opportunities to rake in multiple six-figure salaries.

Tech leaders chimed in to offer thoughts, jokes, and memes about the situation. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, mused on X, "What do you think Soham Parekh's LinkedIn header is?"

Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, said in a post Wednesday, "If soham immediately comes clean and says he was working to train an AI Agent for knowledge work, he raises at $100M pre by the weekend."

The memes keep coming, including one shared by Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy, a San Francisco-based AI company, with a nod to "The Social Network."

The meme read: "You can't get to 500 million jobs without making a few enemies."

Do you have a story to share about overemployment? Contact these reporters at [email protected] or [email protected].