Soham Parekh recently became internet-famous (or infamous) for allegedly working three to five full-time jobs at Y Combinator startups simultaneously until Playground AI founder Suhail Doshi blew his cover in a very public X thread.
Most of us struggle with just one job, while Parekh casually juggled an entire startup portfolio. He literally had jobs at hundreds of YC companies.
But Parekh isn't alone. Welcome to the era of AI-fueled overemployment! Tools like GitHub Copilot and Replit Ghostwriter have dramatically boosted developer productivity, letting tasks that once took hours now wrap up neatly in half the time. If you’re rational (not an idiot, but I didn’t want to write that) and Parekh, for all his faults, appears supremely rational you'll naturally reinvest these surplus hours into another full-time role.
Thanks to remote work, productivity metrics tied mostly to completed JIRA tickets, and supervisors who barely glance at Slack status icons, quietly working multiple gigs is easier than ever. Another angle is that AI managers likely coming soon, given that I've seen three startups already working on this will probably detect overemployment far better than human supervisors.
Side note: What's the point of project managers anymore? I’m confident that the engineer is now the project manager and code reviewer, while the AI handles the coding. Also, check out the Reid Hoffman tweet it’s pretty good.
With AI tools like Cursor (MIT team), Windsurf (MIT co-founder), Cluely, and others, coding has become easier than writing in English. In fact, I can code better than I can write now, but most of you probably don’t want to read Python code about this. Despite these productivity superpowers, most companies have surprisingly little to show for it. According to consulting firms in the MBB world (soon to be replaced), just 1% of companies feel their AI efforts are "mature." (Translation: "We’ve finally managed to schedule our first meeting about AI.") Companies quick to adopt AI report revenue growth 1.5 times higher than slow adopters.
Yet many organizations remain paralyzed by compliance, governance, and bureaucratic nightmares (think of the sloths scene from Zootopia). This corporate sluggishness is precisely what allows overemployment to thrive. Communities like Overemployed.com and numerous Reddit forums actively encourage ambitious multi-jobbing, complete with VPN tricks, calendar aliases, and even virtual assistants hired solely to attend video calls. People were pulling these stunts long before ChatGPT became your favorite co-worker, but generative AI is making it irresistibly easier.
Of course, companies aren’t thrilled. They're responding with stricter IP agreements, keystroke monitoring, and explicit clauses about AI-generated work. Tech layoffs like Microsoft's recent "AI-driven efficiency" cuts are corporate code for "We just realized half of you were secretly freelancing anyway."
What about declining birth rates? Will we run out of people to do the jobs? Probably not. Japan’s handling of its shrinking workforce, affectionately dubbed the "Land of the Rising Robots" by the IMF, shows how automation effortlessly picks up demographic slack. Japan’s robotic tomato pickers alone suggest the future of work might be less "9-to-5 grind" and more "24-hour automated salsa-making."
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