Moonlighting as a service: Ethical violation and/or growth hacking
The Sohan Parekh conundrum
One pre-read and one interview before you get started.
There is perhaps a little bit of Anna in all of us, but we should be careful of her.
The Soham Parekh interview
Moonlighting as a service: Ethical violation and/or growth hacking
Soham Parekh, a young software engineer from India, was recently outed for secretly holding multiple full-time jobs. Founders and investors have since flooded social media with memes, outrage, and admiration in equal measure, while asking: Was Parekh’s extreme moonlighting an unethical scam, or simply an audacious embodiment of tech’s ethos?
Moonlighting, working a second job on the side, is hardly new.
Albert Einstein (1905) – As a patent clerk in Switzerland, he spent off-hours writing five theoretical physics papers that revolutionized science.
Steve Wozniak (1970s) – He worked full-time at Hewlett-Packard by day and designed the first Apple computer by night in his garage. Wozniak even offered HP the rights to his design out of obligation to his employer. HP declined, freeing him to join Steve Jobs in launching Apple.
Tim Berners-Lee (1980s) – While employed at CERN, he took on a “side gig” automating information-sharing between scientists, which led to his invention of the World Wide Web.
The list of famous moonlighters is long, but was Soham Parekh moonlighting or crossing the line?
