Can we trust software engineers from Russia?

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There is a perception that software engineers in Russia are more liberal than the average citizen of that country. In this article, we take a closer look at what one can expect from a Russian developer.

It all starts early

Individuals are shaped by their environment from a very early age. People meet a lot of friends in kindergarten and school, and often stick with these people for the duration of their life. Also, a lot of beliefs are imposed in the university, and it’s not a secret that the Russian education system stands behind the illegal actions of their country.

For example, Russian rectors support the war in Ukraine. It’s easy to imagine what kind of propaganda Russian students are dealing with, and it is not a surprise that they graduate from universities with a strong faith in imperialism.

Face-to-face with Putin

A lot of prominent computer science students get involved in competitive programming. These competitions provide opportunities for gifted people to interact, demonstrate, and improve their teamwork, programming, and problem-solving process.

Some of these competitions are internationally recognized, and typically have worldwide final stages where the best participants compete for money prizes and glory.

Russian teams historically show quite good results there, and the best team does get domestic recognition on the highest level. It’s not uncommon for Russian presidents to meet winners of international programming competitions in person: [1] and [2].

Russian president with prominent students
Putin lifts a trophy with Russian team members and their coach
Putin made sure to influence young prodigies since as early as 2004

This is, frankly, quite suspicious: Putin, while busy planning a full-scale war in a neighbouring country, can find time in his tight schedule to meet a bunch of nerdy students.

Is it possible that these innocuous student meetings are an early opportunity to recruit young programmers into Russian intelligence?

Russian coders are contributing to Russian wars

According to the investigation by Bellingcat, Russia employs programmers to configure cruise missiles. The same missiles that eventually hit Ukrainian residential buildings.

It’s not only professional hackers who attack Ukraine, however.
Russians created an organization on GitHub inviting strangers to build software for the Russian Armed Forces, as well as hacking software of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. They were not looking for people with specific military or hacking experience, just someone who knows Rust, Java or Android - very mainstream technologies.
Every engineer who can pass an interview in a large technology company is competent enough to help there. The real question is, who wants to fight on the Russian side deliberately?

Yandex files

Recently, Yandex source code was leaked. Yandex is Russia’s largest IT corporation, that’s often dubbed “the Russian Google”.

One of the early findings is the usage of racial slurs in the code.

Is it just a matter of time before someone finds the code for Yandex interfaces for KGB?

Bottom line

We ask organizers of all the international programming competitions to recognize and condemn the Russian war in Ukraine and ban the Russian Federation from participating in their competitions.

  • Do not allow Russians to take part in your events. Can we ever be sure that these Russian programmers, who are programming missiles now, haven’t started their programming journey with one of the famous international coding competitions, like ICPC, Google Code Jam, or Facebook Hackercup?

  • Sign the petition to ban participants from Russia, Iran and Belarus from taking part in ICPC coding competition.

  • Do not hire Russians. You can never be sure if you’re not hiring a spy. You may have a very ordinary business, but Russian special agents need a cover exactly like that. And then, MI5 wants to keep tabs on the spy and forces you to discretely report on every step of this new employee.
    Is it the thing you want to deal with, instead of focusing on your business?
    If the whole spy story sounds like fiction, you still run a higher chance of hiring a toxic person that may find it acceptable to use racial slurs in their code.

  • Share this page with your employer. Increase awareness and protect your workspace.

The civilized world should stay united, and show solidarity with the brave people of Ukraine. Thank you!