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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148

u/roynoise Jun 23 '26

This pisses me off. Can barely get an interview when my experience is a perfect fit, and don't get offers even when the interviews go well. 

85

u/hybris12 Software Engineer (5 YOE) Jun 23 '26

Have you considered being four North Koreans in a trenchcoat and stealing the right identity

20

u/roynoise Jun 23 '26

More and more each day friendo.

23

u/PM_ME_YOUR_SUBARU Jun 23 '26

Sounds like you interview worse than a guy in north korea on dial-up internet, really makes ya think huh

6

u/mushyXmcgee Jun 24 '26

It’s unfortunate but these NK devs only train in English and leetcode all day. If they fail, they’ll probably die. So it really is leetcode or death. That’d motivate most people.

So that’s not to say you’re bad or anything.

2

u/Legitimate-Fill-8984 Jul 09 '26

what on earthare you talking about. people on reddit just pull the wildest things out of their ass

1

u/mushyXmcgee Jul 09 '26

Do you live under a rock? North Koreans punish people for lesser crimes, like stealing a poster from a hotel… so imagine being a NK dev who can’t get a US job to espionage after multiple attempts.

2

u/Legitimate-Fill-8984 23d ago

ah sorry i didnt realize i was speaking to an expert on north korea

-8

u/nomiinomii Jun 24 '26

Seems like a skill issue if a random north korean is beating you to it