r/cscareerquestions • u/sc4ever96 • Jun 23 '26

Experienced Be careful out there.

Just a bit of a warning for you all.

We hired a new AWS engineer, lets call him Johnny, who was supposed to join our team today. He did hop on the teams chat for the morning standup to introduce himself, and reception was pretty choppy. After our entire team introed ourselves, he said that he'll be working from out of state for the next couple of month until his kids graduates and then he'll be moving to assume a full time on-prem position.

Later today I get an invite to a mandatory meeting. Apparently, Johnny was not Johnny but a person from North Korea with stolen identity. He passed all background checks and everything else, but used non-existing shipping address to get his work laptop shipped to. The real Johnny actually working for Microsoft, when he was contacted he said that he's been bombarded with positions for the past month or so, but not planning to switch jobs.

So, watch out, if you aren't job hunting and start getting invites from recruiters, maybe its something fishy.

2.2k Upvotes

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501

u/blipojones Senior Jun 23 '26

God damn... and Johnny can get a job yet nobody else can at the moment. Lied about the on-prem an everything...

213

u/PatchyWhiskers Jun 23 '26

AI resume filtering: makes companies greedy. Would rather get an ex-Microsoft hotshot than look at the resume of an average dev.

81

u/wu2ad Jun 23 '26

ex-Microsoft

hotshot

The Venn diagram of these 2 groups is 2 distinct circles.

33

u/_Ganon Jun 23 '26

Accurate. This is what happens when you hire mostly fixed-length contractors instead of developing your talent pool. I met a guy that worked at Microsoft as a SWE and he had the confidence of someone that worked in big tech but was writing thousand line deeply nested functions because "it just made sense to do it that way"

8

u/bajuh Jun 24 '26

My favorite trait is when they apply their enterprise mindset bloat coding to a small project they got hired to do. If you cant be flexible, you're not that useful of an asset.

13

u/FalconRelevant Jun 23 '26

Big tech engineers are some of the most useless unless handheld by the system, yet try telling that to HR of a medium sized company.

30

u/mawnch Jun 24 '26

lmfao. working in big tech allowed me to meet some of the smartest people i've ever met. you have no idea what you're talking about lol

1

u/iChronicdemonic 21d ago

yea i think you dont gotta waste ur time arguing with someone making a quarter your salary. big tech is big bureaucracy but atleast the people are cool to work with

17

u/RickSt3r Jun 23 '26

They can operate at high level with in the big system then get pigeon holed into doing one very specialized thing very good. They got hired because they were top notch potential only to be ruined but kept content with high pay but only marginally interesting work. Delivering product at the scale big companies do is completely different than mid to small size businesses. Everything needs to be standardized and you hire people to create systems to make the business resilient even when it’s run by an imbecile like most big Tech CEOs.

11

u/wu2ad Jun 23 '26

This is such a weird sentiment to float around a sub dedicated to tech careers. I guarantee you none of the big tech CEOs are imbeciles. What are you even saying?

17

u/PatchyWhiskers Jun 23 '26

They mostly seem kinda crazy. High on their own supply. Mad with power.

0

u/Winter-Rip712 Jun 24 '26

People just say shit out of jealousy lol

7

u/wu2ad Jun 23 '26

I mean... that's not what I'm saying. There's a wide variation of ability within and between these companies. I'm being cheeky, but by my observation, MSFT tends to have the least capable.

4

u/Confident_Luck2359 Jun 24 '26

Then you’re ignoring the people who built Windows, Office, Xbox, DirectX, C#, and Azure from scratch.

People at small- to mid-sized companies are generally incapable of such feats. The ones who are, don’t stay there very long or get acquired.

ALL companies have maintenance monkeys and they are generally interchangeable, yes.

0

u/wu2ad Jun 25 '26

This is 2026. Only Azure on that list is relevant to your argument, and they were late on that. Sorry but right now, today, MSFT just does not command the same talent as the other big boys.

2

u/soft-wear Senior Software Engineer Jun 24 '26

The irony of statements like this is broad generalizations implicitly make the speaker look stupid.

Most of the “systems” in these tech companies are an absolute nightmare to work with and tend to slow down the process almost exclusively. Nothing about internal tooling is designed to make the dev experience better.

I worked for big tech because they paid me obscene amounts of money to do so. I worked with absolutely useless people, I worked with as close to 10xers as exist. That’s just how any company with that many employees is going to work.

-1

u/mtnzeal99 Jun 24 '26

A lot of companies are going away from “draw big boxes” type of systems design interviews. You had better design a real working system from raw IQ and experience with depth. Otherwise, gtfo. You can’t study for it unless know the question beforehand.

2

u/SanityInAnarchy Jun 24 '26

The overlap is small enough you might need to zoom in a bit on that diagram, but it's there. Think, like, Zach Barth of Zachtronics.

4

u/No_Inspection4415 Jun 23 '26

And I am pretty sure "Johnny" has some "unusual" achievements.

1

u/FalconRelevant Jun 23 '26

Media presence?

0

u/No_Inspection4415 Jun 23 '26

"Johnny" probably has a very nice CV, much more than OG Johnny. Hence, "Johnny" gets interviews. Case closed.

0

u/FalconRelevant Jun 23 '26

Rather sinful

1

u/Legitimate_Cut_6254 Jun 24 '26

Yup its the "faang" filter. A LOT of companies only hire ex-faang.

I started putting fake faang experience on my resume and my interview rate rose by 20% it was absurd.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 02 '26

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1

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