North Korean IT workers have infiltrated the Fortune 500

I don’t understand this. There are well qualified legitimate candidates desperate for a job. How are North Koreans getting these jobs instead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612448

> well qualified legitimate candidates

How do you choose between a well qualified legitimate candidate and a extremely well qualified 'appears to be' legitimate candidate?

These people are presumably not advertising themselves to be from Pyongyang.

Is this to imply that north Koreans can't be well qualified legitimate candidates?

Well qualified, sure

Legitimate? Seems unlikely, given the state of affairs in North Korea

Imagine that your reputation didn't matter, getting sued was out of the question, and there was no criminal liability: your job, backed by the government, is to be employed by as many tech firms for as long as you can, you'd probably work pretty hard on coming up with a reasonable but very good resume and work hard on how to interview well. Now, you're a professional interviewer and might conduct 10x-100x more interviews than your average dev, and have a network of people helping you optimize your cheating.

Given that background, I personally find it unsurprising that they're having success and AI tools are just making it that much easier

Absolutely damning of the tech industry’s interviewing and recruiting process if companies can’t distinguish between a “professional interviewer” (regardless of their nationality) and an actually talented candidate who does one interview a year or so.

Legitimate? You do realize it's illegal to hire NK workers in most civilized countries?

I think professional interviewees have more time honing their craft than people that are conducting interviews. It's IMO a similar attacker/defender mechanic as we see in security. Attackers have the upperhand in most cases as they only need to find one or few vulnerabilities on presumably a gargantuan attack surface.

This mentions the Fortune 500, and some of the financial companies I'm familiar with treat IT like janitors and have no qualms getting the lowest crap devs whom they can boss around. They don't want good devs and someone part of a team.

they are not being hired using their NK identity. For all intents and purposes they look like American or Asian(Vietnam/China/etc)

Spy agencies lying? Unthinkable!

That's beside the point. My point is that there are no legitimate NK employees.