An interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Effectiveness of the “How fat is Kim Jong Un?” question

• Some think scammers hang up not out of ideological fear, but because they’ve been “outed”; like most scams, once resistance is detected it’s cheaper to move on to easier targets.
• Others argue fear is real in totalitarian systems: anything insulting the leader can be recorded and used against you, and giving operatives permission to mock him would risk normalizing irreverence.
• Many doubt it will keep working now it’s public; agents can be trained to deflect (“I don’t follow politics”) or feign ignorance.
• Several point out this would be an HR nightmare: body-shaming, irrelevant to the job, weird for overweight or East Asian candidates, and likely to show up online as evidence of a hostile culture.

Alternatives and hiring‑process failures

• Commenters say you can detect many fakes with basic diligence:
  • Check LinkedIn depth, working phone numbers, and consistency of location and accent.
  • Ask detailed follow-ups on claimed projects instead of only LeetCode.
  • Use in‑person or high‑quality video interviews, plus KYC, background checks, drug tests, and verified payroll.
• Some share experiences where KYC or payroll providers eventually caught a suspicious but technically strong hire.
• Several see the real story as broken hiring funnels: North Koreans with weak paper trails get through while experienced devs can’t even get interviews.

Laptop farms and technical workarounds

• “Laptop farms” are explained as US-based people hosting company laptops so foreign workers appear to be domestic: local IP, local hardware, often accessed via remote KVM.
• This is cited as evidence that simple IP-based geofencing and EDR monitoring are easy to bypass.

Historical and cultural analogies

• Many compare this to wartime “shibboleths” (baseball questions in WWII, anthem verses, words like “squirrel”) used to detect spies, with debate over how accurate those stories really are.
• Others mention similar Korean phrases that demand insulting Kim as a loyalty test, and a comic about using absurd questions to detect AI.

Ethics, culture, and remote‑work politics

• Some object to turning interviews into gossip or insult rituals, even against dictators.
• Others suspect the NK narrative will be used to justify broad crackdowns on remote work and push return‑to‑office, rather than fixing interview quality.