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Comment by conradev | Hacker News Reader

I can’t find the tweet but apparently you can also filter these folks out by asking them to criticize Kim Jong Un

I’d be shocked if that was still true after the first time someone tried it. If you’re running an undercover operation, you’re going to give your agents backing to say whatever they need to say to maintain their cover.

It's very naive to think you can win against any state-level advanced persistent threat.

It's not naive at all. Most of these threats can be thwarted by simply following basic business and security best practices. Many hiring managers are lazy and incompetent, and don't even do the bare minimum.

That’s why it’s important to remember that not all state-level attacks are created equal. Intelligence agencies can create fake personas at varying levels of cost and realism, but if North Korea is doing that for revenue they’re not going to spend the same kind of resources they would trying to get, say, nuclear weapons data.

The situation here is significantly asymmetric: the attacker has to do a lot of work to build a realistic persona but the defense can make that much harder with a few basic checks. It’s been cost-effective in the past because companies were skimping on their hiring and internal security, similar to how the identity theft crisis was mostly a crisis in companies doing due diligence.

If someone asked me to criticize KJU, that would be the end of the conversation. I criticize people on my own or not at all. I suppose I would become a false positive.

Sounds just like something a North Korean would say

Honestly, sounds like a red flag if even a legitimate applicant is unwilling to voice an opinion on the Kim regime.

Without context it seems like a weird trick question, like phishing tests and most corporate training.

Replace North Korean leader with Biden and Trump, how that sounds?

Pretty sure a huge number of Americans would happily curse both with the fire of a thousand suns.

On demand? Also will this trigger some discrimination law?

You can legally discriminate on the basis of political views.

In California?

(IANAL.) Whether that is legal depends on jurisdiction, in the US. CA has protections, for example.

It sounds like you are supporting those villains, justifying their atrocities.

I don't consider myself to know enough to criticize.

Of course what little I do know is all negative. But I've paid only limited attention, and I get nothing from primary sources.

I expect the same from practically everyone -- perhaps excepting South Koreans who at least speak the language. I'd consider it good judgment to say that you just can't meaningfully answer the question.

I'd read a statement you hand me, if you thought that would suffice. But I'll admit I'd consider that weird and likely useless.

If you know so little about a major, long term authoritarian dictatorship, consider this evidence you need to educate yourself.

This was dead because?

Because it was a low-effort, uselessly snarky answer to a valid opinion.

Especially when the reality is everyone “knows” so much that isn’t true or that is true but they could never personally confirm it.

I am not 100% that North Korea exists. I’m pretty sure, but I can’t KNOW it without going there.

So while dictators are bad, the Kim’s are probably bad, sorry if I don’t go to the deep end repeating everything that someone else taught me.

Because "educate yourself" is quite possibly the most annoying, low effort thing you can say to someone whom you think should know something that they don't. Either share the information with them or don't engage at all; there's no need to be a dick about it.

Please do not foster this concept that I have a responsibility to proactively criticize ever fascist regime of the past century in order to dispel implicit notions that I am "supporting" them in vague undefined ways.

To be basically informed about, yes. An educated person should probably have a view about broad topics like North Korea, and whether Pyongyang is more worthy of criticism than praise. And I don’t want to work with someone who is open to the morality of the Kim regime.

It isn't your place to know the political sympathies of everyone, nor is it your place to decide what constitutes 'support' about every possible issue. It is simply not viable to do this if you want to work together with large, diverse groups of people. There are people with objectionable but private views in the world and in the workplace, deal with it. This is entirely separate from people's public views.

I would find that question extremely weird in a job interview for a normal job, and I have no problem saying that the Kim regime is one of the most horrible regimes ever.

100%

It's not a false positive. It's a true positive

If the person is so obnoxious as to not be able to give such a silly statement, imagine how they would be fun in your team

I can ask people to criticize trump before hiring them?

Most AI's would have a light but informed opinion on the Kim regime. Here's ChatGPT's:

https://chatgpt.com/share/687a8963-81e8-8004-b457-432fae79d4...

I would never allow any potential client ask me ANY political questions. Not because I like any political figure but because I am trying not to encourage fucking thought control. I hope we are not on Nazi Germany yet. It is just simply not their fucking business. On the other hand if they offer me a million in cold hard cash just for that I would tell then anything they want to hear.

> I would never…

> … if they offer me a million…

This is exactly like that famous joke! :D “Mam I believe we’ve already established that. At this point, we’re just negotiating.”

You nailed it. If they want to pry into my private things they better pay for it ;)

The punchline of the joke isn’t that it’s weird to put a price on X, but that it makes it rather hollow to start that same paragraph with four different variations of “I would never do X!”.

It’s kind of like an Abbott and Costello routine. I would never do that! How dare you suggest that. You’re a commie. The scum of the earth. I’m above that. Gimme five bucks I’ll do it right now.

There is a big difference between saying you gonna do it and actually doing it.

Even with the context of knowing the fake worker problem?

If so, I suppose that’s another good reason to ask the question. It filters out both North Korean fakes and people who are going to be doctrinaire about small things.

perhaps a better solution would be to ask an opinion about KJU... not to "criticize" him this feels pretty dystopic indeed, like 15m of hate...

It was 2 min of hate ;) and this clearly isn't the same as trying to rile people up; it's a thin attempt to get people to self report if they are lying with some sort of higher level "gotcha".

Feels like the story about disconnecting Chinese gamers from matches automatically by typing "tiananmen square" or the story of the Battle of Siffin with one side putting pages of the quoran on their spears in hopes the enemy wouldn't fight that way. Unclear how accurate the stories are or how effective it may have been but kind of interesting at least.

It was 2 min of hate

Inflation.

Lol the ever increasing cost of living gets you in places you don't always expect!

If a company asked me anything about the leader of North Korea during an interview for a tech job, I would conclude that they were not a serious company.

What I think about any country leader is totally irrelevant to tech work. So the company is either 1. Wasting my time with a totally irrelevant question or 2. Their hiring process is so vulnerable, they can’t even tell if a candidate is fake. Neither of those would make me particularly excited about that company.

I think I would encourage companies that are experiencing problems with unwittingly hiring fake employees (North Korean or otherwise) to ask such bizarre questions. Or they could just flat out state that they have been having such problems and will therefore be implementing schemes to detect fake employees.

I would very much appreciate that. I think it would be grand if they could even put that in the job posting right up front. It would help me cross that company off the list of places I would be willing to work. I personally don't want to work at a place that cannot tell whether I am real or fake.

Companies ask a lot of weird questions instead of asking what they really want to know: "will you join a union?"

You'll likely have to be careful with profiling here. You'll probably need to have documentation/proof that you ask this question to all candidates regardless of race or immigration status. And yes, that means you'll need to ask it to people that clearly aren't North Korean (though that maybe be a good thing in general as I'm sure the next step for the NK regime would be to pay people who are not Asian or who have American accents to do interviews if the practice became widespread)

Maybe more likely that they just assume they are caught, or assume the likelihood of getting caught is higher when there is overt screening for North Koreans.

Similar to why email scammers don’t need good grammar, filtering out difficult cases quickly and move on to easier ones.

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