The Hidden Ethics of Multiple Employment: The Soham Parekh Paradox
Is this “Hustle-Culture”?
Soham Parekh is a Mumbai-based software engineer who simultaneously worked for multiple Silicon Valley startups over the last 2 years. His case has presented the tech world a very fascinating ethical dilemma that personally, I think transcends the simple questions of workplace honesty. In case you’re unfamiliar with this story, this TechCrunch article provides a fair summary to bring you up to speed of last week’s happenings with this story.
The Soham Parekh affair transcends the particulars of one individual’s professional conduct or the specific companies that allegedly employed him simultaneously. It illuminates a deeper structural tension at the heart of modern capitalism, i.e. the growing disconnect between corporate loyalty expectations and the economic realities facing today’s workforce.
In an era of diminished job security and stagnant wages, Parekh’s actions, as ethically dubious as they are, represent a calculated response to systemic market failures. The venture capital ecosystem, with its emphasis on rapid scaling and worker expendability, has created conditions where traditional employment relationships increasingly resemble one-sided contracts. When companies prioritise shareholder returns over employee welfare, rational actors inevitably seek alternative strategies for economic survival to deal with increasing economic inequality, job insecurity and the erosion of job security in favour of a rising “gig economy” and normalisation of multiple income streams.
It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that what we’re seeing here is a rational response to irrational market conditions, whereby workers are incentivised to hedge their employment bets in ways that would have been unthinkable in previous generations. The implications reach beyond Silicon Valley, touching on questions of workplace ethics, employment law and the social contract between employees and their employers in an era of economic uncertainty.
Examining the Venture-Capital Start-up Model
The modern tech industry operates on principles that tend to prioritise capital accumulation over worker welfare. This is more usually the case especially when it comes to dealing with global talent. The implication of this is that conditions where extreme survival strategies become logical responses to this systemic exploitation then become more common-place.
It’s no secret that VC-funded startups routinely engage in practices that demonstrate little regard for worker security or well-being. The industry’s normalisation of mass layoffs, the prevalence of unpaid overtime disguised as “passion,” and the systematic extraction of value from workers through equity structures that rarely benefit employees all contribute to an environment where traditional notions of employer loyalty become difficult to justify.
VC-funded startups will also frequently use equity compensation as a substitute for fair wages, knowing that the vast majority of their so-called ‘equity grants’ will prove worthless while providing immediate cost savings. To be more brutally honest, this is no more than a sophisticated form of wage theft, providing immediate cost savings to companies while transferring the financial risk to employees who often lack the means to the information asymmetries enjoyed by their employers.
VC-funded companies will also usually hire and terminate employees at will, often for reasons entirely disconnected from performance, the moral obligation for exclusive commitment becomes questionable. This industry’s normalisation of mass layoffs coupled with the prevalence of unpaid overtime romantically disguised as “passion,” and the systematic extraction of value from workers through equity structures that rarely benefit employees all easily contribute to an environment where traditional notions of employer loyalty become quite difficult to justify.
Let’s also not forget Silicon Valley’s practice of hiring global talent at below-market rates while extracting maximum value from their expertise which some would argue represents a form of digital colonialism that exploits geographic wage disparities while maintaining the fiction of meritocratic fairness.
These contradictions render corporate demands for exclusive loyalty intellectually indefensible. Heavily exploitative company practices and demands for loyalty cannot coexist indefinitely in a sustainable employer-employee symbiotic relationship. Cases like Soham Parekh’s signal that workers have begun voting with their divided allegiances.
How do we move on from this?
This case ultimately reveals the ethical contradictions inherent in contemporary capitalism, where individual survival strategies increasingly conflict with corporate expectations in an environment of systematic exploitation. While Soham’s deception was clearly unprofessional and potentially harmful, his actions although inexcusable, could also be seen as a rational response to a system that prioritises capital accumulation over worker welfare.
The real ethical failure here may not just lie with Soham’s individual choices but also with a system that creates conditions where such extreme measures as working 140 hours a week appear necessary for survival. The truth is this oft-celebrated ‘hustle-culture’ within VC-funded startup ecosystems, with its celebration of disruption and resource extraction, has also created a labour environment whether directly or indirectly, where the traditional notions of loyalty and commitment have become very one-sided expectations. So, rather than focusing solely on individual ethical failures, it might serve us better to examine how to create more equitable and sustainable employment relationships for both employers and workers alike.
The more important question for us to focus on then isn’t just whether Soham acted ethically, but whether the system that produced his actions can itself be considered ethical. After all, in a truly just economic system, workers would not need to resort to such extreme measures for survival, and employers would not operate on assumptions of unlimited extraction from their workforce. Until we begin to address these systemic issues, cases like Soham Parekh’s will continue to emerge as symptoms of deeper structural problems rather than isolated individual failures.