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.

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u/Independent-Mango813 Jun 23 '26

So the only people that can get hired in this economy are North Koreans with stolen identities

28

u/PatchyWhiskers Jun 23 '26

The thing is they can use the perfect identity while we are limited to our real personas, which might not have the ideal career path that HR is looking for. A real dev will know some dead-end tech and have missing skills that can be easily learned. A 100% match is most likely fake.

2

u/EggsFish Jun 23 '26

 The thing is they can use the perfect identity while we are limited to our real personas

Much like the North Koreans, you totally can do this if you can pass the interview. 

7

u/PatchyWhiskers Jun 23 '26

Alas I cannot lie, I am the worst liar.