[BossingAround]

> Evading in-person meetings or requests for drug tests

Why would they evade drug tests and meeting in person? Do the "techies" claim they are not Korean at all? Surely, a North Korean would pass as a South Korean to (at least) any non-Korean colleague?

[some_random]

Because they're slaves kept in dorms in various South East Asian countries that can't leave, their handler wouldn't allow to go to an in person meeting or take a drug test. They're also usually lying about the city and country they're working from.

[BossingAround]

Ah that makes sense, didn't realize that they aren't free to move.

[rob74]

Ok... but if the job is remote anyway, why can't they work from North Korea itself and use VPN (as another commenter mentioned) to simulate being in another country? Or would that run into bandwidth/"Great Firewall"/other problems?

[SamBam]

They can, I think that's the point of the "avoiding in-person meetings" warning.

Say you have an office in South Korea. A South Korean developer starts working for you as a remote employee, and their IP looks like it's connecting from South Korea. You say "cool, awesome, but you need to come to our office in Seoul once every two months for our regular all-hands meeting," and they keep skipping out on it, claiming family emergencies or whatever. That's the warning.

That was my understanding.

[eberfreitas]

Source?

[some_random]

Here's a fantastic NYT article on NK defection that includes some details of the conditions https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/09/world/asia/north-korea-ch...

This article mentions NK workers posing as Americans by paying for VPNs into people's home wifi https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fbi-thousands-remote-wor...

[kstrauser]

In today’s game of “North Korean or Bay Area?”:

- North Korean: Uh-oh. I can’t physically do either of those.

- Bay Area: I’m not taking bus-to-BART-to-bus from Berkeley to the city for some meeting that could’ve been a Zoom. Drug test? Is there a minimum level I need to pass? Not doing it.

[aaomidi]

If someone is asking for my piss, it better be in a sexual context.

Drug tests are dehumanizing af. What I do outside my work hours is my own private time.

[Beached]

unless you want to work for the gov.

[zikduruqe]

This. If there is a government contract involved, even if you are not working directly on it, you will have to pee in a cup.

But getting around that is stupid easy and simple, it is laughable.

[alexjplant]

> This. If there is a government contract involved, even if you are not working directly on it, you will have to pee in a cup.

This is not correct. When I held a clearance (which I don't anymore and won't again) the Department of Defense never made me take a drug test. I did, however, work for a publicly-traded government contractor that made me take one both times that they hired me as a matter of course. I worked for three other such defense contractors that were happy to have me without such a test.

I thought it was just a mild inconvenience until I developed a sinus infection and started taking pseudoephedrine and diphenhydramine two days before I was scheduled to take the test. Because these OTC drugs can cause false positives for methamphetamine and marijuana respectively (depending upon whether the test is reagent-based or GCMS) I had to quit taking them and suffer through two days of an upper respiratory infection to pass the test and placate some HR drone in Alabama.

I'm sure that there's a policy or exemption process for this situation but the same company also almost pushed my start date because their background verification service couldn't verify my past employment _at the same company_, i.e. their onboarding team was grossly incompetent. I decided not to chance it as I didn't want to go weeks without a paycheck while they sorted out a false positive. Needless to say I don't waste my time dealing with this class of employers any longer.

[r2_pilot]

Not that this helps you now, but I believe if the reagent test fails, they immediately GCMS the sample to both determine the quantitative amount of substance in question, as well as rule out false positives, so you probably would have been fine (for the diphenhydramine at least).

[Qem]

The drugs you took outside your work hours don't know they have to exit your bloodstream the hour you start working. Perhaps not all occupations need such tests, but at least people driving vehicles and operating heavy equipment should be made sure to have their system clear while at work.

[salamanderss]

The tests usually don't have granularity to know if you're intoxicated during work hours precisely. Most test for metabolites that either aren't intoxicating or intoxicating in far higher levels than detection cutoff.

[wizerdrobe]

Pure speculation, but there is a large North Korean methamphetamine trade. Allegedly, per escapees, many North Koreans use meth for purposes of work enhancing stimulants and hunger suppression.

Perhaps these slaves are being doped up to focus on the work?

[alephnerd]

> large North Korean methamphetamine trade

It's common all among the working class in Asia and the Asian Diaspora (Bayswater Basic if you've ever been to London). It's dirt cheap and keeps you awake while. doing any monotonous or manual labor.

In this specific case, a drug test for a remote job requires ID verification. It's a simple redundancy to verify that the person you hired is that same person.

[kube-system]

Even if they aren't on drugs, they can't physically show up to the test, because they are lying about their location, and they're trapped in a different country.

[Cthulhu_]

Yeah, plenty of people will adopt the persona of someone else just to get hired.

If you're a white person on a freelancer website, you may get approached by someone who wants to buy your account.

[salamanderss]

Is this really a thing? Who would willingly burn their reputation and risk federal charges for sanctions violations over measly account sellout.

[gumby]

How do you do a drug test on a remote worker?

And why? If they can’t do the job you fire them.

[hotnfresh]

Government contractors. It’s a legal requirement. They schedule you at a local-to-you testing center. They’re everywhere, because truck drivers and some other jobs are legally required to test.

It’s very dumb. Scheduled-in-advance piss tests aren’t great for catching much other than weed. Most other things aren’t detected in urine after 2-3 days. Weed metabolites, which is what they test for, stick around for potentially weeks. The whole exercise will be practically pointless if weed ever gets removed from the set of things they’re testing for.

[edit] what I’d love to see replace this junk is some kind of probably-computerized attention and reaction test, for jobs where it actually matters. Which is only a subset of the ones that currently test, but, when it comes to truck drivers and heavy machinery operators and such, I don’t care if they like to do drugs off hours, but I do care if some straight-edge driver is too tired to drive, and that’d catch those cases, too. Maybe open to cheating, but piss tests are routinely cheated anyway.

[gumby]

> Government contractors. It’s a legal requirement.

Probably things have changed, but back in the mid 90s we had our first government contract, and one thing was that we were required to have a "drug testing policy".

A couple of team suggestions were "you bring 'em we'll test 'em" and "employees have access to private ceramic urine collection devices. After collection, other employees do not have access to the results of processing".

In the end we sent in "Our policy is not to test for drugs" and we got our contract.

(I agree with you that what matters is actual functional risk, not paranoia)

[hattmall]

But hordes of people still fail them for non-weed. I think if you can go the 3 days needed to be clean then it's not really an issue. People with real opiate, benzo or stimulant addictions can't typically go 3 days without using. And there's build up so you can have extended duration of being positive.

[kube-system]

Drug tests are almost always outsourced, and there are facilities around the world that do this.

Why? Depending on the work, it might be a legal requirement. But for the purposes of these guidelines, it doesn't matter. The point is, if they are evading in-person tasks, it could be because they're misrepresenting their location.