He sucked at the job (made excuses for being behind on everything). Very good at interviewing.

An employee on salary is different from a consultant on hourly rate. Essentially, the employee is an ally whom all the intellectual output is retained and will be paid in full regardless of their performance.

By all accounts Parekh did not fulfill his obligation, apparently he is a very good engineer, but he did not give his time to the companies he was hired by. He was constantly calling sick, fail to finish his tasks up until got fired. Since he was a salaried employee, he still received the paycheck despite his abysmal performance.

That said, he definitely became a folk hero :) He is a charming person who pulled a fascinating stunt.

I thought the premise was that he’s an exceptional interviewer (and maybe good engineer), but did no work so as to eventually get pip-ed and laid off. If he was exceptional at getting work done, then you’re right and a lot of the critique is misplaced. Would love to be corrected if that was indeed the case

"good at the job" is elusive and vaguely defined in most companies. They want you be a part of the company and get excited for the product and invest all of your focus in it. It's an unwritten rule but it's there. People who just do the job are not promoted and are looked down upon, in my experience.

I wish it was just doing the job, it should be that way unless you are on commission or one of the owners

*edit: assuming he did the job that is..

he isn't, he commits fraud by not delivering and lying about why there are no results.

I realize this is an employee-centric forum, but playing devils advocate, if these are otherwise good employers, why does it matter?

I wouldn't call it loyalty. I would say that it's more about assymetrical dependency, even if it's a subconscious thing. A lot of managers/bosses want the employees to be dependents of the job.

In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract, meaning it’s breach of contract to do paid work for another company at the same time. The typical agreement being made by an employer is salary in return for the employee’s full time attention, where full time means ~40 hours of work per week, or sometimes more. As a manager I do care if my employees work significantly less than full time and devote that time to other paying jobs, especially if they do good work. That’s opportunity cost; if they could be producing more in the ~40 hrs/week agreement we have, they’re cheating the company and violating the agreement they made. I don’t care if they do hobby work or open source projects in their spare time, if they’re fulfilling their agreed upon obligations.

I think you were not a very good software manager. Let me explain why.

You need to treat the performance of your programmers as opaque, you shouldn't trust your ability to gauge their performance.

Suppose you buy a novel, and you buy it thinking that it was written by an 80year old Author that traveled the world and learned a lot of experiences and was actually a genius and a seductor of women and was a philantropist that rubbed shoulders with politicians.

If you then learn that the novel was actually written by a ghostwriter in china, or by ChatGPT, then would the value of the Novel be the same? No, it would be almost worthless, the content of the novel is the same, if you inspect the product you would not be able to tell the difference. Sometimes the value, or indicators of the value, are in the process.

Stepping back out of the metaphor, the product will show its true value 2, 5 10 years down the line, will it crash when the marketing team figures it out, or you have a viral moment and 100K concurrent users?

You cannot rely solely on the inspection of the deliverables, you must assume that there are invisible or hard to inspect properties that are almost impossible to divine from inspecting the deliverable, but easier to understand by inspecting the talent and process that builds it.

Probably the reaction is because of who (whom?) he defrauded: some YC founders. People have higher expectations for them, I think.

It means you need to be diligent when interviewing people; do background checks.

During interviews, he said he preferred equity over salary.

> It is now clear that some are "allowed" to hack the system of others to their advantage but you are "not allowed" to do it against YC.

That party will last until the regulators notice...

haven’t met a tech CEO who didn’t have at least 3 jobs. conflicts of interest be damned.

I don't mean to be rude, but a "Marathon" ? What world are you living in ?

Most tech-jobs are boring-as-hell bullshit jobs that are required to deal with stupidly designed systems whose phil. is stuck in the dark-ages of PDP-10 (which is why a lot of it gets shipped off to India, or not to 'AI').

What's the incentive to finish the marathon? 0.05% of a 1% chance of a billion dollars?

Some athletes literally run and finish ultra marathons that are longer than three regular marathons.

https://www.wser.org/

There's a risk-adjusted payoff, at least in theory. A 10x doesn't get paid 10x, but also doesn't get immediately fired if the project shuts down, gets paid when sick, doesn't get paid 30% less if company revenues go down.

At least in Europe. I guess in US it's all different.

Who is going to measure this value? Few can, management doesn’t trust these few not to be in cahoots, hence, not possible. At least, that’s how I perceive it in my professional environment.

... and Flo, Matt, and some dude named Haz. Did that not fit your narrative?