An interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers
theregister.com
theregister.com
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.
They also might not have a choice depending on how much their skills are worth to the gov't... if North Korean.
I hate to admit, but sometimes I wish someone forced me to sit in a hotel to learn fundamental CS stuffs that I want to do but passion comes and goes so I never got the grit to actually learn much.
You don’t need to read “A Fire Upon the Deep” first… the stories are more or less unrelated except for setting. (There is one character who is sort of in both, but going into detail about what that means would spoil it too much).
Both are excellent and worth the time. Skip the other Vinge books until you are sure you want to read everything he wrote, they are “merely” 8/10 instead of 10/10.
Vinge was a CS professor who really made sure everything “fit” together in his works. Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.
NB that Vinge was the one who popularized the concept of “the technological Singularity”. His books have interesting authors notes where he talks about coming up with ways to write about a far future when he believes that the Singularity is right on track for 2050-2100.
Luckily I quickly discovered that the Children of Time series filled my need for more spider scifi.
It's sometimes enormously funny when you were around to witness Usenet. Especially when you realize there's one guy who all along knows something about the story's most essential reveal - but writes like a deranged conspiracy theorist, so nobody really talks to him.
"A Brave New World" by Aldus Huxley
I don’t get why more companies don’t leverage this better.
I don’t think that’s appropriate. You’re jesting about it, NKs working abroad are basically prisoners and their families taken hostages (as in don’t come back or do something we don’t like and we’ll kill your wife and children)
Hardly comparable.
I would imagine the state takes the vast majority of their pay.
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.
Expectation: intelligence services, spies, secrets
Reality: bunch of ponzi schemers, arrogant sub revolutionaries, greedy people, envious people. All together in a pseudo network of trust, always at each other's throats. Unrepentable and thus, impossible to forgive. Sad but not much.
Sounds like complete bullshit. Your response is exactly the sort of thing I see as a social scam. Situation awareness? That makes no fucking sense.
if someone thinks there's a conspiracy behind everything so they trust nothing and then it turns out that the thing could not be trusted but because of a different reason than the suspected conspiracy doesn't make the conspiracy theorist wrong about the lack of trust. just the reason for the lack of trust.
compare that to someone that trusts everything. they get screwed because they were not paying attention to trust should be suspect. yet the kooky conspiracy person was better off even if for the not so right reason
You are talking about personas, like they're action figures or something.
"the conspiracy theorist"
"the spy"
"the trusty shieldbarer"
Then you did a mini plot to tell a small storyline that attaches itself to the conversation. I can do that too if I want.
If you do it to help people, then it's good. If you are doing it to confuse someone or get advantage, then it's a dick move.
Raising those issues about "suspecting everything" is something that I've been exposed to my whole life. Specially in the last years, it has been more intense.
Instead, I believe the stronger position is to believe in human kindness. A healthy mixture of skepticism and trust that cannot be put in a box. Being good without being a fool. Which entails the act of sometimes entertaining the dumb conspiracy agitator or other disruptive personalities.
The more you do it, the harder it is for toxic people. They quickly get into a very previsible box and even pretend they like it.
In the conspiracist world view, things aren’t caused by negligence or incompetence. There aren’t systemic causes that lead to events. Opportunists don’t jump on opportunities that a chaotic event opens up. Things are caused by plans thought up and executed by cabals of powerful people (illuminati, CIA, “the elites”, banking elite, the deep state).
However things appear isn’t the “real” story. Everything is deception and whatever the true causes are hidden behind the “official narrative”. Large amounts of evidence, scientific studies, and other information are ignored and dismissed. Wild conjecture, random anomalies (“isn’t it weird” style rhetorical questions to show the “official narrative” is false), and other “alternative” evidence are embraced instead.
Things are connected and you need to find the patterns. This is often accompanied by finding “hidden messages” and symbols that show that seemingly unconnected events share a common cause and were conducted by a common group as part of some larger plan.
Skeptical thinking, by contrast, is about questioning claims and doubting things without sufficient evidence. Embracing the scientific method and accepting scientific conclusions, while still remaining open to new information. Examining biases and accepting your own limited knowledge.
When some SaaS become unavailable due to some DNS issue, is it a conspiracy that their status page is also not updated when their status page is also affected by the outage or is it the deep state's fault trying to keep the average worker down with a cunning plan? A skeptic sees the outage and the status discrepancy as a company that just got things wrong. The conspiracy nut things the Illuminati it out to get them specifically.
Maybe it helps to have been in/around cults for more time in their youth than one would like to admit, but a skeptic and a conspiracy nut are nothing alike to me.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk...
> Konichiwa, Brzęczyszczykiewicz-san.
For anyone not familiar, this is a Polish joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U
If I don't bookmark it now then I'll never be able to find it again. :-)
> It represents the same sound in the Polish alphabet, remaining in active usage by some as an alternative for the letter Ż (called "Z with overdot").
> In Polish, the character Ƶ is used as an allographic variant of the letter ⟨Ż⟩ (called "Z with overdot") although once used in Old Polish.
Funnily, there's a counter-argument to "Straż Miejska" from article you linked, with "Straƶ Miejska" in another Wikipedia entry[1] :)
It may depend on the region (I was raised in the eastern Poland) but I also remember that in the primary school we used a different symbol for the letter "s". But only in hand-writing while any printed "s" looked like it does currently. I'm unable to find the UTF-8 character resembling the hand-written version.
sz contrast with ś/si, as does cz and ć/ci, or ż/rz and ź/zi, or dż and dź/dzi
(might have swapped one or two)
Add in some good etymological reasons why the consonant+i combinations are not respelled and the whole thing makes a lot of sense.
"rz" is a bit of a special case since it's pretty much etymological - what used to be "r", and corresponds to "r" in the same roots in other Slavic languages, but became to be pronounced like "ź" in Polish. What to do about it depends on whether you want your orthography to be purely phonemic (a better choice IMO, just look at South Slavic languages - it works great for them!) or retain the etymological distinction. But even then it would be better off as a diacritic.
What would be really neat tho is having a single Latin-based notation that works consistently across all Slavic languages, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_alphabet. For example, we could use cedilla to represent post-alveolars: ç and ş - and then use acute accent to indicate palatalization ("softness"). So e.g in Czech you'd only need s/ş, in Polish you'd use s/ş/ş́, and in Russian you'd have all four possible combinations s/ś/ş/ş́.
Tiny correction: "rz" is spelled exactly like "ż", while "ź" sounds differently.
The 'rz' phoneme has the same sound as the letter 'ż' which is a different sound from the letter 'ź' (the latter being a softer sound - one that foreigners usually find easier to reproduce).
Whether you write a word with the 'rz' or the 'ż' is governed by a set of orthographic rules that are of course peppered with numerous exceptions.
I always hear people repeating this, but in my experience this is not true. People doing mass scams are just not very competent.
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.
Implicitly, I suppose that makes the lights on the windward side blitzen.
It was something like Are you as smart as a 5th grader?
A question would be something like "Who was the 5th president?" and the answer was "Benjamin Franklin" or similar. :)
Curious if you have any links that go into this further. Were they Americans of German descent who rejoined family in Germany, or? I'm sure it's not monolithic but curious if there was a pattern.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/german-ame...
Otto Skorzeny was an interesting man.
This sounds like it can't have been true, or at least, can't have been common practice, because the false positive rate would be way too high for shooting a person.
Also, they could just have them count three strikes using their fingers
So it's perfectly reasonable that a person of German ancestry would just not care about American sports.
You're referring to instances of captured spies (potentially captured by said baseball questions) being tried as spies and executed.
The former did not happen, the latter did happen (which I don't think anyone here would've disputed).
A better one I heard is asking about the second verse of the national anthem. The enemies studied it to know it, but ask your average GI(or most americans) what the 2nd or 3rd verse is, lol.... that's a good trick.
What percentage of Germans who grew up in the US and speak perfect American English can't answer those basic questions correctly?
Edit: It reminds me of my favorite definitely fake boomer story: That people used to call out speedtraps on the highway by pulling over and standing in a salute… because cops can compel you not to alert people of a speedtrap… but they can’t compel you to not salute… because that would violate the first amendment? Before the internet dudes used to just sit around telling each other stories like this.
I'll rephrase the question a bit here: How could any idiot white male raised in the US in the last 120 years possibly not know about baseball?
What I think was happening was that the US GIs would ask the infiltrating German about current baseball. Not Ty Cobb stuff, but Ted Williams stuff.
Also, for the non-baseball fans here, you have to remember that there were only 16 (28) teams back then [0], essentially no trading of players, and no interleague play. So for your team, you really had to know the core 8 players and a few pitchers. Adding in the other 7 teams gets you to ~80 or so (maximum) and they would reappear on the exact same teams year after year. And there really wasn't any other sports worth mentioning in 1943 [1]. Cognitively, it's a lot less than today.
Also, the Germans wouldn't have access to the information about the 'current-ish' state of the game. It was mostly in newspapers back then, and with the war, getting information from the sports pages out of St. Louis wasn't happening.
Same as it ever was, sports is the lingua franca of the US.
[0] 8 in MLB-NL and 8 in MLB-AL, 6 in NL-NL and 6 in NL-AL (yes, the Negro leagues are the major league, but black GIs weren't on the front lines where Germans would be infiltrating (yes, it's more complicated than this simple comment))
[1] The NFL was pretty nascent still.
I was once invited to a Super Bowl party, and I thought sure, I'll come. So I went, and watched the game for a bit on the big TV. I was asked, which team are you rooting for? I answered "the ones in the red shirts".
That didn't go over well.
Because their knowledge of teams and scores and wins and players would be 4 years out of date.
Following American baseball news from Germany in detail would be virtually impossible in the 1940s.
Related: after the war, they were concerned that there were Nazi spies still in England they hadn't uncovered. When the files in Berlin were seized, they went through every single asset sent to England. Not only had they successfully identified every agent, and turned quite a few into double-agents, they also noted that very few agents going the other way had ever been detected.
> There was even a case in which an agent started running deception operations independently from Portugal using little more than guidebooks, maps, and a very vivid imagination to convince his Abwehr handlers that he was spying in the UK. This agent, Juan Pujol García (Garbo), created a network of phantom sub-agents and eventually convinced the British authorities that he could be useful. He and his fictitious network were absorbed into the main double-cross system and he became so respected by Abwehr that they stopped landing agents in Britain after 1942. The Germans became dependent on the spurious information that was fed to them by Garbo's network and the other double-cross agents.
This did not happen.
However, at the time, in the massive confusion of a wholly unexpected large-scale German attack, rumours and paranoia were rife, including that of German parachute landings behind the lines.
A result of this was the widespread belief, at the time, that Germans had infiltrated and were giving fake orders, etc, and so troops were indeed widely being suspected, and asked for example the capital of Illinois and so on (and being asked by privates, who did not know that the actual capital is Springfield rather than Chicago, to generals, who did know).
The Roman Catholic liturgy is so stringently regulated that it is in fact very difficult for any priest or layman to stay current after a decade or more has passed. Perhaps this is one of the genius moves of the vernacular liturgy: that the Latin liturgy hardly changed its words for 500 years, but English and other languages are being constantly retranslated and reinterpreted with new Missal editions.
Case in point: the neutering of the Church for 40 years. The Church was made an "it" in English, and only after a top-down correction was issued did she become feminine again. This did a lot of trauma to many Catholics on visceral levels.
More up to date changes include the addition of "Holy" to "...for our good and the good of all His [Holy] Church]." this one is guaranteed to catch out anyone who's not been to Mass in 10+ years, such as at a wedding, funeral, or Christmastime.
A very recent priest's change is "...who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, [One] God, forever and ever. Amen." the "One" is now omitted, as of last year or so, and in fact every church was compelled to scratch it out in their existing Missals until new editions could be printed.
It is these sort of very subtle yet urgent changes that can really trip someone up if they're not 100% current with liturgical directives. So if you ever suspect you got a fake priest marrying you, see if he says "One God" or not!
You have two factors working against this. The first is that in a communist/totalitarian regime, you don't want to give informants any opportunities for leverage. The fear of it being (mis)used against you is enough to take it off the table as an option.
The second is that were the regime give permission to speak this way, it risks normalizing irreverence toward Kim Jong Un, beginning with a large swathe of employees working in espionage.
Similar to how part of the Knights Templar's training was to learn to spit on a cross without spitting on Christ "in their minds" in case they were ever captured and made to do so by their captors.
Eerily reminiscent of 1984's doublethink.
Doublethink is to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. The spitting on the cross thing is to say/do something without actually believing it.
Very much the current USA zeitgeist.
The Knight Templar is working for a being that can read his mind. Surely it can see through any duplicity that he needs to engage in, in that being’s service.
In any case, we're talking about a dictatorial communist regime, where informants and informing on people is widespread, and where having a case file of excuses to eliminate people is standard. We shouldn't trivialize this by appealing to standards that don't apply here.
Thats the good thing about being a theocratic dictator. Your rules don't have to be consistent, rational or even make sense. Oh if you slander the supreme leader while holding a goose feather that you burn at his monthly worship you are forgiven. Or whatever.
If so, there might still be limits.
You could make the challenge an n-part, back-and-forth exchange, of increasingly worse insults of that personage.
Complete with escalating to enthusiastic shouting, slapping the table for emphasis, making crude illustrative gestures, etc.
Perhaps there's only so much that an authoritarian work center will tolerate.
For legitimate candidates, doing this at the start of an interview might be sending a confusing message about the corporate office environment. On the other hand, it would serve as an icebreaker, to help candidates feel comfortable sharing. And it will tell you more about the candidate's creativity than Leetcode regurgitation does. Well, until students start buying "Cracking the Techbro Interview: Trash-Talking Edition" books, spending months memorizing lists of insults to recite in interviews, and rehearsing their delivery, with enthusiastic full-arm gesticulating. Actually, that would still be better for the field than Leetcode interviews.
Will never understand the mindset of corporate executives.
Video filters are still pretty obvious in real-time, and, like the one example given in the article, if the person says they are from Poland but can't speak Polish, that's a good sign, too.
and now they’re trying to reduce staff, hence RTO.
nothing confusing about the situation.
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.
In todays's lesson, we develop an understanding of the old term "You get what you pay for."
The company I worked for (as a hiring manager), paid fairly low wages, and expected employees to stay around for a long time, so I often judged candidates by more than “on paper” qualifications.
A more likely reason is that you just called them out. See how most scams work. There is no reason to stick around instead of pursuing easier targets.
On top of that, if necessary and meanwhile, others of the same team might do better at the same time for the same employer and succeed by contrast.
- so fat that when she jumped into a swimming pool, NASA found water on Mars.
Unless I knew what the reason was for asking, it would be like if an interviewer suddenly talked about how much weight Adele was gaining.
Beyond that, if I looked east Asian, I could also see myself walking on this question for another reason. It would feel like a comment on my ethnic background, which has no place in an interview.
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.
Only really works in industries that are “small world”
Even in small-world industries, assuming they occasionally accept outsiders, they will still encounter some form of this problem.
I guess it comes down to industry. We're on hn so emphasis is on technical ability and in that context what you say is true. I'm in a space that requires trustworthiness is part of the core value proposition so there is little acceptance of outsiders and much emphasis on back channel checks that the candidate is solid. NK fake candidate etc is just not a thing in that context
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.
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...
Within 5 seconds? I doubt they could load google maps that fast.
> Also I have no idea what my front door color is
No hire!
We mostly enter through a side door, and the back door.
... and I also couldn't tell you what color either of those are.
An answer that's also suspicious, because it means they know what you're implying by asking, and they've prepared for it.
In fact I’d bet a good chunk of people, especially tech literate people, could tell you the most recent date of Google Street View for their house.
[edit]
Actually over a decade out of date (timestamp says March 2012, but somehow also copyright 2025).
I don't quite understand the "laptop farm" concept. Can anyone explain it?
A laptop farm hosts the corporate laptop (domestically) that is sent to the remote worker. Hardware is provided to work the power remotely, along with all other functions.
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/us-wom...
https://sashaingber.substack.com/p/the-23-year-old-who-infil...
https://cyberscoop.com/doj-indicts-five-in-north-korean-fake...
https://therecord.media/arizona-woman-pleads-guilty-north-ko...
I suspect these farms have full-fledged remote KVM setups.
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.
The Muslim fundamentalists to did 9/11 shaved their beards to look less suspicious.
There are other tell tale signs that you can watch out for (at least for now)
Call their phone number. All the scammers had non-working phone numbers in their resumes.
I wrote an article about this based on my experience: https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...
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.
> and maybe also avoid hiring fully remote employees.
There it is.
In-person interviews are the most robust solution to the problem.
> ”How fat is Kim Jong Un?”
I played a game of Taboo (a party game) yesterday night. I asked the question "the surname of the leader of party ..." (the third largest one in my country). The guy I asked it to looked at me and answered "I have no idea." He's old enough to vote even if he didn't have to do it yet. Leaders of foreign countries? Maybe he doesn't know where to place North Korea on a map, even the general area.
OK, we could say that the lack of a general culture could be a hint not to hire that person so that could be a legitimate termination of the interview anyway.
They do seem to be decent programmers though based on my experience with these scam interviews.
6'4 - 210lbs
If they can say the line with a straight face they are either an incredible poker player or the wrong kind of American.
Not to mention it seems a VPN to Asia and back would add multiple seconds to every response, plus answer support in earpiece delay. How is that not very noticeable?
"I found North Korean Spies on Discord..." by NoTextToSpeech
Sadly, most corporate executives will learn the wrong lessons from this and instead use this as an opportunity to push RTO even more.
No body positivity in North Korea?
Really? What kind of company would make a big deal out of that?
Asking a candidate about how fat someone is definitely does sound like something that would get an interviewer in trouble.
Many people are deeply insecure about their weight, many women feel very uncomfortable when men make any comment about anyone's weight, body or appearance. The candidate might post on Glassdoor or LinkedIn about the hostile (and possibly sexist or "bro-y" or noninclusive or discriminatory) environment.
Even aside from the HR type concerns, it could legitimately negatively impact the candidate's performance. Imagine an overweight applicant being asked that question, feeling flustered and embarrassed while answering "... about as fat as me?" and then trying to reverse a linked list or whatever as their next question.
The dear leader approves of your workplace!
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.
Or maybe if you keep the convo about KJU being fat, you trigger an alarm that schedule a police visit to your house, in a state were they first act and then ask.
You can just generalise the question like these interviewers. I’d criticise Kim Jong Un just to see what was up with this interview question.