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They actually also interview for Chinese companies too. I have a friend who got a big shock when he saw someone wearing military uniform on Zoom. Apparently they didn't bother to hide the identities. My friend told me that the interviewee has very, very good skills (e.g. deep knowledge of X11) but he quickly declined him.

He dug a bit deeper and found out that the North Koreans have special programs for gifted kids. They send them to the schools for dedicated CS education. They also (presumably without proof) have access to the source code of various commercial closed source software.

It's a good pay job (comparing to other NKs) and they get to do what they love, so they are pretty loyal. But I always wonder, wouldn't they burn out eventually? Maybe they can switch fields or become teachers, though.

There is a very close analogue in Korean, called "say f*cking Kim Jung-un now 김정은 개새끼 해 봐", typically used as an irrelevant Shibboleth-like question to move the goalpost during a discussion. As like most such questions, this method won't last too long even if it supposedly works right now; they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.

So we’ll require RTO for just about everything except paying for flights for in-person interviews, where being in an office might actually significantly matter.

Will never understand the mindset of corporate executives.

> "One of the things that we've noted is that you'll have a person in Poland applying with a very complicated name," he recounted, "and then when you get them on Zoom calls it's a military age male Asian who can't pronounce it."

Why not simply pretend they are from South Korea?

Tinfoil: Maybe these ones are supposed to fail so everyone feels like they are so clever in stopping them.

I recently got one such contact through telegram with a so called Chinese worker asking to use my upwork account to get jobs and he will pay me a share of what he makes through my account. I had a quick chat with him to know how he got my contact info and it looks like they just scrape every profile on github and upwork and my username on github was thesame as the one on telegram. After sending him a meme of Kim Jun Un and asking him if he works for him he quickly deleted our wholesale conversation.

During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.

The GIs discovered they could just ask the officers about baseball. A wrong answer, and the officer got shot.

I heard this from my dad (WW2 vet). I don't recall seeing it in any documentary. He told me I would have been shot :-/ as I had zero interest in baseball.

You can weed these people out with basically any question. "What's the difference between an inner join and an outer join". These guys always sound like they're reading out of a textbook.

What's astonishing to me is the number of companies that will supposedly hire someone and give them credentials without even seeing them on camera. The proliferation of this narrative seems somewhat real and somewhat calculated to further undermine the legitimacy of remote work. But you would think something like "in-person orientation" and requiring that people use their cameras in meetings would solve a lot of the issues here.

> "My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?

I wont be surprised if the list of "must-denounce" will be growing and in the future there'd be a litany of "mock the enemy" for every interview.

Or, we can just start doing interviews in person again.

I'm now seeing this all over the place, and if it worked up to now then that's over. NK will just give people a recommended way of answering the question, and if they follow the script they won't get in trouble. Like perhaps, Kim who? Oh, the North Korean leader? Sorry, I have no idea. Further questions about NK can just be deflected with "I don't follow that stuff, sorry".

Kim jong un is so fat he has his own event horizon.

I love this article. It seems like it is lifted directly from a series of LinkedIn posts I shared about my experience with North Korean job scammers. I also wrote a quick guide on how to protect yourself. Link to LinkedIn post in the blog post below.

https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...

It’s a bit more in-depth and offers a few other ways to identify the fake devs.

As an American, if someone asked me in the middle of an interview to declare "the north korean leader is fat", i'd consider walking out too.

In light of this, employee referrals and in person interviews should become increasingly important.

Sadly, most corporate executives will learn the wrong lessons from this and instead use this as an opportunity to push RTO even more.

NK planning a heist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM

Is this article really about north korean fake* workers?

It looks to me that it describes what a sham the interview process is instead.

* are they really fake? I'm led to believe they actually do the work...

>This is most likely a laptop farm, where someone in the US agrees to run the laptop from a legitimate address for a fee, typically around $200 a computer, according to Meyers. Last year the FBI busted one such operation in Nashville, Tennessee, and charged the operator with conspiracy to cause damage to protected computers, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, intentional damage to protected computers, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to cause the unlawful employment of aliens.

I don't quite understand the "laptop farm" concept. Can anyone explain it?

I wonder what other creative ways there are to expose North Korean employees. That fat question is hilarious but I bet there’s even more hilarious possible questions.

>'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly,

I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.

I would think the people doing this are not the lowest level foot soldiers but are somewhat closer to elites and as such can afford to be a tiny bit cynical if the dear leader signals his approval.

Honestly, if hiring standards have fallen so low that NK operatives are able to get through, then more power to them.

I'd be shocked if a simple 15-20 minute conversation with the interviewee's perspective manager wouldn't eliminate all chance of this happening. Video filters are still obvious in real time, any decent interviewer can tell if a person is being fed answers, just ask them more detailed information about their background and projects and not just leetcode-type questions.

All of this just goes to show how abysmal (in some cases anyway) the hiring process is for offshore workers in the first place.

This is not a difficult problem. My last position had me take a drug test. I had to go to an actual building, show my ID, and the place/results were logged. They also did a background check, which presumably would have flagged any issues. I think I emailed a copy of my ID. One interviewer even flew me out for a day. They're making an issue out of nothing, and it's not clear why.

> and maybe also avoid hiring fully remote employees.

There it is.

Someone should make a Netflix series about a North Korean fake worker because their lives and work sounds very interesting (different).

I presume the candidate needs to provide his address. Have someone else google street map it, and then at some point ask "what is the color of your front door?" If he takes more than 5 seconds to answer it, end the interview.

Book recommendation for this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_(novel)

To save you the click and skim, the question is:

> ”How fat is Kim Jong Un?”

I’ll always ask this question when these articles appear. How are North Koreans so successful in landing interviews and even jobs?

There are thousands of laid off tech workers desperately trying to get even an interview, let alone a job. Yet, North Koreans having a success rate better than zero seems like a major problem.

The article even says they are interviewing candidates with long complicated names with defunct LinkedIn profiles. Yet, seemingly a normal candidate cannot get past the resume filter.

Tons of articles posted here over the recent years of how broken hiring is and the horror stories. This is taking broken to a whole new level.

CAPTCHAs in real life.

Eventually they will get permission to say it during these operations

I'll keep that in mind. I'd probably be crucified by HR for saying fat at work though.

I'm reminded of SMBC Comics' recent proposal for detecting the use of AI:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/security

“We need you to insult him as bad as you can, and we will then send it to NK, wait a month, and if you are still around you are hired”

> "My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly, because it's not worth it to say something negative about that,"

They likely terminate the call because you come across as so naive and simplistic that you're unlikely to be in possession of any good IP worth stealing.

Edit: I am confused, on one hand these are sophisticated state sponsored actors, on the other, they can't respond "I don't know?". Which one is it? I think this whole "North Koreans are afraid of offending Kim Jong Un" is an overplayed trope.

isn't it fat shaming? or because it's some bad guy, is it allowed? what if I'm fat, and don't want to answer