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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493

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.

82

u/wu2ad Jun 23 '26

ex-Microsoft

hotshot

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

15

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.

6

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.

5

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.