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Software Engineer Detained At JFK, Given Test To Prove He's An Engineer (mashable.com)
New submitter mendred quotes a report from Mashable: Celestine Omin, a software engineer at Andela -- a tech startup that connects developers in Africa with U.S employers -- had a particularly unwelcoming reception when he deplaned at John F. Kennedy Airport and was given a test to prove he was actually a software engineer. A LinkedIn post detailing Omin's challenging experience explained that upon landing in New York after spending 24 miserable hours on a Qatar Airways flight, he was given some trouble about the short-term visa he obtained for his trip. According to the post, an unprepared and exhausted Omin waited in the airport for approximately 20 minutes before being questioned by a Customs and Border Protection officer about his occupation. After several questions were asked, he was reportedly brought to a small room and told to sit down, where he was left for another hour before another customs officer entered and resumed grilling him. Omin was instructed to answer the following questions: "Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced," and "What is an abstract class, and why do you need it."
We're Number #1! /s
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If true
Write something in Forth.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I donâ(TM)t work for free. If they want me to solve problems, they can sign a consulting contract.
But hereâ(TM)s an idea, if they are going to force software engineers to do this sort of thing, maybe they can break up some vexing Homeland Security software problem and piecemeal it out, sort of like crowdsourcingâ¦
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I cannot wait for a day when only people able to answer (fairly basic) software engineering questions can fly. Security will be a snap. Of course, I assumed I can answer the questions for them -- otherwise I'll be going sans my family and most of my friends.
The most surprising part of that is that questions were pretty decent. Although an abstract class is not a universal concept, and I'm not sure if we should be limiting things by choice of language. After all, we're the land of the free...
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I had to go through a 3 hour interview .. i mean policy interrogation in Israel to leave the country. They'll ask the same questions over and over again to see if you answer correctly.
He really should have messed with them. Binary tree? That is where we obtain the components for the binary explosive.
Perhaps he was being given a surprise job interview?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The most surprising in this story that Custom officers were able to come up with the quoted questions.
It's been so long since I even looked at having to do one of those, that I would be put back on the next plane home, LOL.
From now on, I should keep a copy of Cracking the Coding Interview with me and use Emirates' onboard WiFi to practice on LeetCode while I'm in air. I don't want to be detained for not knowing how to find the largest prime in a left-ended partially heavy red-black tree in big O of zero.
I wonder what kind of tests do they give them.
It's total nonsense that the USA is detaining and turning away so many people at the border. By the time someone gets to the border (with visa in hand), the only question should be whether they match the visa - whether they are who they say they are. The "extreme vetting", or whatever you want to call it, should have already happened when the were granted the visa.
Of course, if you really have evidence that someone is planning a terrorist attack on the USA then rather than simply turning them away to try again later you should be letting them in - and then throwing them straight in jail.
This is the second "report" I have heard about that. But the last guy was in Houston and was European.
There is more to this story that were not getting.
That's something that should be checked before issuing a Visa, not after they're already on the fucking plane here.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
This is an understandable and completely normal security precaution.
Really?
Haven't most of the Islamic terrorists who've been caught trying to fuck with airports and air traffic been trained engineers?
Wow! Computer science degrees are now so worthless in the USA that graduates have to take jobs working customs.
They would have made him wait 8 hours with no food, call the RCMP when he got cranky. The RCMP would then tazer him till his heart stopped and then the two officers would try to cover it up.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The correct answer to all of these questions is "why don't you look on stackoverflow?"
Being stuck for 20 minutes in customs is hardly a reason to complain. I've regularly waited upwards of 30 minues to clear it. Whoop de dee, border control is finally doing its job of making sure people who come into the country are who they say they are.
Everytime I enter France with my work visa I have to explain explicit work details with them about my job and if I still do it (evan after impossibly long flights too!). What's Mashable really trying to get at here?
It's been too long since I've seen a binary tree to remember that sort of thing, and as someone with mostly experience in C, I don't know much at all about abstract classes...
This has already been listed as exaggerated news - aka fake news. Why do people continue to make s**t up?
Surely it would have been easier to check if he was an engineer by forcing him to try to talk to a girl?
They should have forced him to app an app while apping other apps to prove he's a modern app apper instead of a LUDDITE!
Apps!
I've had border guards not be sure if I was really me when I was driving a rental car across the border. Drug traffickers will sometimes use rental cars and my driver ID happened not to match the location where I had rented the car. I'm not offended by the fact that they double-checked it was me. With this guy, they verified his story with his employer and asked him a question or two. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but there are much bigger things to worry about. And we don't know the circumstances from CBP's POV. (Did he match a pattern of people claiming to be software engineers from nigeria who turned out to be here for criminal purposes, for example? I don't know, and neither does he.)
Clearly, however, he should have been treated respectfully and with an "I apologize for the delay but we needed to verify your identity. I hope you have a wonderful time." They need to maintain authority, but it's also important to keep the country welcoming.
Real lawyers write in C++
...is EXTREME VETTING!!
If you agree with checking up on a person's 'bonifieds' at all then what the hell is wrong with '1 last check'. Having a Visa in hand does not grant you cart blanche to come & go as you please, hell having a passport & being a citizen doesn't grant you that right, at least not without being questioned. If you believe it should than lobby for different laws to be applied at the border but equating 'getting on a fucking plane' to 'allowed to enter the country without any further questions being asked' is not the way the world works...
If someone doesn't know if a binary search tree is true, then therefore they are an evil doer. Just send out a test to every person and thing in America. Those who fail go to a privatized version of GitMo! Due process confirmed by test.
As an Iranian who lives in Canada I have had my fair share of run-ins with the great computer scientists at the CBP. I remember I was coming to the US from Canada in 2008 to attend a conference in Florida and I was selected for a "random" search. I had the poster for the paper that I was presenting with me and the officer asked me to roll the poster open and explain it to her! She even asked a few semi-intelligent questions about it!
Celestine Omin is an Nigerian national. Nigeria a country currently fighting (with US support) its own homegrown terrorist insurgency in the form of Boko Haram. This is an understandable and completely normal security precaution.
But not an understandable and completely normal procedure. From the Linkedin article linked from TFA:
On 3/1, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson responded to the 2/27 request for comment. He said the agency "does not administer written tests to verify a traveler’s purpose of travel,” but would not comment on Omin’s case specifically. He added that foreigners trying to enter the country "bear the burden of proof to establish that they are clearly eligible" and "must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility."
So, Omin was required to satisfy the border agent that he was who he said he was, but not with a written test.
He had a B1 visa, obtained prior to travel. The visa said he's a software engineer, but doesn't prove he's a software engineer. It would have been prudent of him to carry additional documents, such as a transcript of courses he has taken.
To avoid SNAFUs like this, it's best to talk to an immigration lawyer before you get on the plane. Border agents are supposed to follow the law and their agency's rules, but unpleasant things can still happen.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The 2nd one is reasonable as a cursory check, but checking if a binary tree is balanced!?! That's an interview question ("are you a *good* programmer?"), not one for fleshing out if you are a programmer. I don't even know of many devs I've worked with recently who would be able to answer that (even wrong), since it doesn't involve piecing frameworks together into a web app.
I thought we fought the Cold War so we could have a country where we didn't have to do this. You people are ruining the USA and you deserve every condemnation and curse possible.
And Celestine is a muslim first name, right.
Will they quiz me on my knowledge? They might have to provide a visual aide though.
WHAT is your favorite color?
French historian detained for 10 hours
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/...
Australian Children's author detained
http://www.smh.com.au/entertai...
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...
"Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced," and "What is an abstract class, and why do you need it."
I got nothin'.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
deux is French for two. I don't know what "deaux" is (although maybe google translate does.)
bonifieds? srsly? It's Bona Fides. (That's Latin for Good Faith.) Sheesh, what is this world coming to.
This.
The 911 airplanes were hijacked by, among others, ______. (hint: pilots)
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Similar story with this Australian python programmer: http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/travellers-stories/aussies-weird-immigration-interview-in-the-us/news-story/8222c65d2f12e6691ef27c9b1753e821
Almost nobody today has a need to know how to balance a B-Tree. Unless they happen to work on the innards of a database system, library, etc.
Sure, I learned this 35 years ago, and sure we had to do it for some class. I suppose Computer Science students still have to do it today. I've even done it in practice, but it was a LONG time ago. I would have to look it up, as would most software engineers.
In fact, any software engineer that would write something like this off the top of their head is engaging in bad practice. That would be my answer!
As a practical matter today, if you really needed to do it, you would search for best algorithms. And then question whoever asked you to do this, as B-Trees are pretty old and lame at this point There are better data structures to accomplish the goal.
What next? Ask somebody to write a compiler? "Sure, get me the Dragon Book..." (But, as well, that is surely obsolete today, as well.)
The border agent either Googled for some questions to ask a software engineer, or failed a Google interview exam. Which - I've read, Google doesn't do any more, and for good reasons.
That's something that should be checked before issuing a Visa, not after they're already on the fucking plane here.
How? Sure you can check all you want before they are granted a visa, but how do you know that #1 The person that answers all the questions is who they say they are. And 2. The person who just got off the aircraft and is standing at the immigration counter is the person who answered the questions in the first place?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
An engineer is more likely to be a terrorist than the general public.
Omin was instructed to answer the following questions: "Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced," ...
[ I'll add, seriously, that I couldn't write that function on the fly after a 20+ hour flight. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think I remember the quadratic formula, does that count?
My wife and I are American citizens. Nonetheless, we get a set of basic questions from the immigration officer that are obviously designed to make sure that the person to whom the American passport (or, in this case, visa) was issued is, in fact, the person standing in front of them. I'd be pissed about the wait, but it's an entirely legitimate function. They aren't usually this detailed, but we're American citizens, not foreigners from a country that isn't part of the visa waiver program.
It's usually pretty perfunctory by air - I'm sure they can see we had round-trip tickets, and that I probably wouldn't leave my traveling companion abroad - but we did get a little more than usual when we came back in from Canada by ground. Even then, though, it was: where do you live? Where are you headed today? Where do you work? Bring anything back with you? Then another set of questions for my wife, again designed to establish that she spoke colloquial American English and had a coherent story. He took a glance at the contents of the trunk and waved us on.
Now, when you pull up to these, there are at least four or five cameras in the lane. I'm near-certain that the guy had a Google Street Maps picture of my house pulled up on the monitors in his booth. He was just checking to see that we had stories that made sense.
"find . -type f -iname 'fuck you'" and then hand in the test. "And if you'd you need more answers please see consult /dev/null. If not satisfactory, have fun in /var/log universe because I'm going back ~. Bash bitches!"...Throw in some Tux gang signs. "Teeeee Unit!" And just stare at the blank faces in satisfaction because you know the guys giving the test have no clue what any of it means and that's as good as it will get.
Customs once harassed me at SFO on my return flight (I'm a citizen.) They kept asking the same stupid questions. About the fourth time, they realized I was giving them the same stupid answers, verbatim, word for word. This irritated them. They threatened me with felony arrest and a few other random nonsense things. I waited. They let me in. From felony arrest to do whatever the fuck I want in 20 minutes. Not to mention they let me take a fucking iPod through international customs without even seeing it. ( i forgot it was in my pocket.) This was in 2006. The Germans didn't have any trouble finding it. LOL. American security is a joke.
That's true, but a passport with the visa could've been taken away from the rightful owner. Border guards remain the last line — and have always been empowered to revoke any earlier-granted permissions/visas.
I was once grilled about the shopping malls around my house (or where I allegedly) live — and I am a US citizen... Of course, buying most things online, I was not well familiar with the malls. I guess, my facial expressions and body-language convinced the guy, I was not lying...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or maybe immigration would just throw an exceptional fit...
Border guards, and not just American ones, always ask questions to see if you can answer them and then grill you harder if you don't answer them convincingly. Even as a tourist, I've been asked what I plan to see or do in a country, or what was my favorite thing I did by such and if I didn't have an answer quickly coming, I'd get the third degree. Since then, I've always had some answers prepped or just whenever they give me a question I can go on about endlessly, I do because after the specifics of who you are, where you are going and for how long, they're just asking you a general personal question to see if you break under questioning. After 24 hours on a plane without any sleep, he was probably asked what he did and mumbled some answer. When they asked him a more detailed one he probably was fairly vague in his description. Eventually red flags get raised and he's past the threshold of getting through with even more questions. I bet if he'd earlier just started talking about something he knew alot about in a technical manner till they told him to shut up, that would have been the end of it and he could have gone on his way.
Just sayin'
The things you have to remember when travelling abroad.
Which - I've read, Google doesn't do any more
Oh, they do. Only a month or two ago, I was contacted by a Google recruiter and given a list of study materials. I was explicitly told to expect stuff like that in the interview. I was also told that there was no rush for scheduling the interview, as candidates typically take months to prepare.
I told them I wasn't interested.
You just have to spend thousands of dollars on legal advice before traveling. That's the new normal in the war on tourism.
> The visa said he's a software engineer, but doesn't prove he's a software engineer.
This does not matter. All the government should be concerned with is - all other things being equal, would you let this guy in. If the answer is yes, then it is not the government's job - not the State Department, not Customs & Border Protection, not any other agency - to vet domain-specific competence. That's the employer's job, since they're the ones who have to initiate the process of securing a B-1 visa for the employee to begin with.
In this case, the B1-holder's sponsor (Andela) should have hired the lawyer to advise Omin and other foreign candidates what documents to bring.
Even with valid documents, someone can still be refused entry to the USA. It is not supposed to happen, but it does. Prior consultation with a lawyer can reduce the chance of this happening, but not eliminate it.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Surely it would have been easier to check if he was an engineer by forcing him to try to talk to a girl?
Thnks to the extreme sexual segregation of islamic cultures, most Jihadis would score as "engineer" on that test.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Just for fun, it's basically a header file, with the implementation left to the user. You can't run the code as recieved, because there is no implementation.
That's actually basically the definition of an abstract function (method). The presence of an abstract function makes the entire group of functions amd the struct which points to them non-instanceable. You can't create an instance of a struct which contains a pointer to a function you've not yet implemented.
Writing objects in C is fun (once).
Good thing he was not a Mechanical Engineer because they "build weapons".
Passionately Indifferent
"You're no engineer! Enjoy your waterboarding, Ahmed."
...I find this line of enquiry perfectly acceptable. I need to verify you are actually a hooker."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
It's "sheer", not "shear." Back on the aircraft with you. We don' t like your kind.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The 911 airplanes were hijacked by, among others, ______. (hint: pilots)
IIRC, a few of the 911 hijackers had taken flight instruction for a PPSEL (private pilot single-engine land) rating but not obtained their license. Technically that makes them student pilots. They weren't ATP (airline transport pilots) as your statement would imply.
Notice that this "pilot" status resulted in changes to security involving even $100 hot dog flyers.
a 'software engineer' can be a lot of different things.
To figure out if you have one, you need an adaptable interview which goes where the subject has knowlwdge.
Otherwise, it's a lottery which may of may not ask a question which happens to intersect with something the person can answer.
Lots of opportunity for false positives and negatives.
Implementing this requires knowledgeable folks which appears a problem for the implementers.
On the other hand, this test makes really great theater.
BTW, it's unclear what was actually asked.
Omin's tweet states he was asked to balance a binary tree. But the story states that he was asked to write a function to check to see if a binary tree is balanced. The latter is part of the solution to the former.
https://xkcd.com/37/
The question was not about abstract class. It was "What is an absolute ass, and where do you find it?". The answer is the US immigration officer, and you find the best ones in NY JFK airport.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I could come with some answer after thinking for a while, but very probably will have some mistakes (after 24 hours flying). So, the best option could be to invent some language and to code that using your own rules based on theoretical libraries (who could argue that this is not a right answer?).
But the real problem here is that the US is imposing so many incoherent restrictions that soon or later it will stop being the main planet plane hub, hurting the own US economy and forcing to find a more open place welcoming people from other countries to share ideas and to contribute to the improvement of modern society.
If the US government is not welcoming visitors, then won't have them. Is this the right way to improve internal economy?
Not considering Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins To Protest a Broken Job Interview Process https://developers.slashdot.or...
So, write it in Brainfuck.
Have gnu, will travel.
Balance functions are scattered all over the net.
Real s/w question should be, "why do you want to check whether a tree is balanced or not?" "What's the usefulness?"
Thanks to opensource, s/w has become a team sport. Not a one-on-one thing.
Google doesn't do any more, and for good reasons.
FWIW, Google interviewers wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) ask "Write a function to determine if a binary tree is balanced" because it's too easy, and it's memorizable. Google interviewers ask questions which (ideally) you have never seen or thought about before and which require you to create a solution on the spot. The goal isn't to test your memory, it's to test your ability to think. Google questions also tend to be deliberately underspecified, to see how you go about gathering the necessary information, and to have various possible approaches, to give you a chance to discuss the tradeoffs involved.
However, the questions do tend to involve basic data structures and algorithms. Questions that involve traversing a binary tree wouldn't be unusual, though there'd need to be a lot more to it than just tracking depths.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
For all I know they called the conference organizers to verify my story. The questions to me ranged from what would be my topic (IPv6) and whether I would be paid (I wouldn't; it was an academic conference at a local university), to was I marketing my services to Canadian businesses (no). And many other questions in between that today I would have had the presence of mind to record, but not then. This was five or six years ago, long before the current immigration security flush.
Software Engineer Detained At JFK, Given Test To Prove He's An Engineer
Trick questions?
Software "Engineers" aren't real engineers.... can't prove that they are no matter what.
You've got better than log2(n)-comparison search? Damn man, you should patent that and make a killing.
Just write a whole bunch of hexadecimal numbers and claim it is machine code for a new processor you're helping to develop.
Eventually more US companies will just move their coding expertise overseas and avoid all this trouble. Besides, it'll cost a lot less - no airplane tickets, no lawyers to bail visitors out of homeland security/TSA/customs custody and other expenses. Will this result in more employment of US citizens who are out of work and might be looking? No disrespect of coal miners, bu how qualified are coal miners at understanding binary search trees and abstract classes? It looks like some programmers posting here don't know or don't remember these subjects.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Agent> So where would you find an abstract class?
Geek> What language?
Agent> Are you trying to sass me son? English! try again....
Geek> umm.... Wherever you defined it?
Agent> Thats not what I have here.
Geek> In RAM?
Agent> Final chance
Geek> Ummm...your question is meaningless....
Agent> The correct answer is: page 267 of "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup . Off to Gitmo with you!
Geek> aargh!
The first question most engineers I know would ask is what language? The second they'd ask is why are you putting me in handcuffs?
"Technically," they flew the goddam planes.
People who fly goddam planes are, "technically," called ____. (hint: goddam pilots)
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... but if I was asked to do it, I'd write it in a 6502 instruction set, just to piss them off.
void balanceTree()
{static int level = 4;
switch(level--) { case 1: putchar(0x44); break; case 2: putchar(0x41); break; case 3: putchar(0x4f); break; case 4: putchar(0x46); break; default: return; }
balanceTree();
}
FUCK YOU -- do you know the 1st thing about Boko Haram? Can you actually sit there and state that you have any evidence that shows that Boko Haram has any capability of employing any sort of tactics above brute force warlord style tactics on their immediate locality? Is there any evidence of Boko Haram having any sort of International Network or capability to strike the US? I would liken Boko Haram to be on par with street gangs here in the US Would you cry foul if other nations started detaining random Americans because the US was home to such "terrorist" organizations as the Crips and Bloods, Skinheads and Mexican Mafia? Because each those organizations are more sophisticated, organized and better armed than Boko Haram
The comment says it all. Please tell me I missed a month.
"Technically," they flew the goddam planes.
Oh, I don't know about that. They manipulated the controls of an aircraft that was already in the air, some of the least complicated things a real pilot does. I've allowed many of my passengers to do the same thing, and none of them has had the nerve to claim they were a pilot based on that limited experience. CFIs do the same thing, and they would be insane to pull onto the taxiway after the first landing with a new student so they could hop out and let the new "pilot" make the next take-off by himself.
Why the hostility?
People who fly goddam planes are, "technically," called ____. (hint: goddam pilots)
You claimed they were hijacked by (hint) "pilots". They weren't flying the planes before they hijacked them, so they weren't pilots yet. And if your only criterion for calling someone a pilot is that they've manipulated the controls of an aircraft at some point in their life, your definition is amazingly useless in any serious conversation.
In the context of "occupations that merit increased interest in immigration interviews" that the AC you "this"d brought up, the fact that some of them touched the yoke in the airplane they hijacked is irrelevant. They weren't pilots in any useful definition of the word, as demonstrated by the ones who wound up in PA instead of NY or DC, and their new occupation as "pilots" has no bearing on any immigration processing they went through before they touched any aircraft controls.
Shit, I'd get sent back.
Table-ized A.I.
They give specific test questions to see if he's a techie, but in the end use a very subjective "don't look convincing".
Why fucking bother with the test if you are just going to guess out of your ass? Unless, maybe it was a stress test to see if he breaks. Cops sometimes use lie-detectors not to see actual lies, but as a shot in the dark to see if the stress alone induces confessions.
By the way, how about a more practical test question, like "Fix the Unicode problem on Slashdot."â(TM) If he solves it, give him citizenship.
Table-ized A.I.
WRONG!! I've taken THIS flight multiple times. 20hr in flight, but it usually ends up being about 24-26hrs with taxi time and whatever the fuck jerking off they do up in the COCK pit.
Few things are funnier than harassing a nerd. Must have felt like high school all over again. :)
Remembering that the cold war was won by bankrupting the CCCP it makes me wonder if, assuming the rumours are true about Trump's strings being pulled by Putin, that their game plan is to destroy the American economy or weaken it.
Everything I've read about what Trumps has done, said or plans to do comes with a nasty long term economic cost.
Any other country would give their new borns to attract the worlds best minds to a "Bay Area", hot pot of technology star ups and world leaders.
Sure there's going to be plenty of abused H1B's but there's also going to be a heap of well deserved work visas which -smart- people won't be so keen on accepting in this current administration.
Cutting foreign aid, building walls, things that please those deluded enough to vote him in which will have a long term economic impact on the US and well as weakening it's world influence and power.
America's strength, which has given it world domination, has been it's economy and that's largely been driven by it's technology.
Pick a handful of American technological achievements and you'll find a large portion of them were created by immigrants not home born "presidential material".
Wake up America, your fucking yourself. Badly.
>after spending 24 miserable hours on a Qatar Airways flight,
I.. I don't think that's Trump's fault that your flight sucks ass.
And hilariously, if the flight was "that bad" then it was far worse and longer than the injustice he faced at the airport.
This should get us rid of Trump faster than any impeachment.
Just ask him a set of questions that the president of the United States has to know the answer to in order to do his job.
So what? So some immigration agent was skeptical of this guy for some reason. We pay them to be skeptical . He did his job and did it in the way he/she was supposed to- he scratched the surface of what might have been a cover story.
By doing this, he successfully arrived at the truth of the matter.
Good job. Thank you.
...to call BullShit on this story. Assuming someone hasn't already done so)
Sorry, it's simply not believable that he would have been given such a test, with such explicit, and actually fairly demanding questions.
Try again.
It's particularly pointless given that any halfway competent terrorist or spy would use a cover story that they had a chance of substantiating. So IF he were a "bad hombre" AND his cover story is that he's a software engineer, there's a pretty decent chance that he's picked that because he has former experience as a software engineer and could pass the test. If he used to be a fashion designer before moving into bad hombreism, he'd probably use a fashion-related job as his cover.
There are plenty of engineers (and doctors and other skilled types) who went to join ISIS: just proving you're an engineer doesn't prove you're not a bad hombre.
I first travelled to US in 1994 and it was made very clear to me beforehand that a visa may not gurantee entry. And that's how it works pretty much everywhere. I'm not sure why, but I guess it's the princimple that decisions to let people in must be based on most up to date information.
The US Government should be as picky when they hire political cronies that provide goods and services.
Good. I'm glad we're actually trying to verify people are who they say they are and are here for the purpose they say they're here for.
B-tree balancing, ok maybe not his thing or language so then ask for relevant ones relative to your specific subject area, eventually they'll ask something you can anwser, the point isn't to always get the correct or perfect anwser, the point is to get you talking about the subject area and gauge reaction\response. So you were delayed a few hours entering the country on visa, so what, it happens snowflake.
This is what happens when you put people who barely were able to finish high school in positions of any power.
Or start every sentence with "so", or "clearly". Or be as pedantic about these details as I'm being...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There is an updated Dragon Book. Looks like it was published in 06 and still has a dragon on the cover.
Time to offend someone
The standard example, the "hello world" of abstract classes I've always seen is Animal. Animal has a MakeNoise method. Subclass Pig says "oink", subclass Cow says "moo" - the same data type. You can't create a generic Animal, you have to subclass to some specific type of Animal.
So what's the difference between an abstract class and an interface? Animal can implement poop(). An abstract class has *some* abstract methods, an interface has *only* abstract methods.
> I think you'll find that you can in fact to that in C; ...
> As for why you might want to specify a (pointer to) an unimplemented functio in C - this would be one way to implement eg. a module that uses a callback function.
Exactly. A callback function is called an "event" in object oriented programming. It should be declared, but not implemented, by the class (module) that calls it. A method is a function that has to be be implemented by the class that calls it. Therefore on OOP we have to distinguish these two types of functions by calling one a "method" and the other an "event".
Say "HDMI" one more motherfscking time! Say it!
For some reason that whole image popped into my head...
Replace the word "calls" with "defines":
A method is a function that has to be be implemented by the class that declares it. An event should not be implemented by the class that declares it, since it's a callback.
"What is an abstract class, and why do you need it."
There are several ways to answer this question, many of them not necessarily compatible with one another, with enough differences to throw people into heated debates. I fail to see the intelligence of asking this question upon entry... unless they were monitoring Omin's behavioral response (to see if he would trip.)
It's almost like America needs a system for approving travel based on a set of responses to questions. We could even administer this system electronically and work with airline around the world to ensure its completed prior to travel. We could even give it a fancy name like ESTA.
Sorry for your loss.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Can you imagine the howling that would be going on if this we had to go through the same process to enter Canada? "A plumber eh? If water is travelling at 30 liters per minute through a 4 inch drain pipe, what is the drop at 6 inches from the outlet?"
Qatar Airways is pretty good. I flew to India with them one time and I would hardly say that the entire time was miserable.
My first civilian job interview for a real job using my electronics education, I was given a schematic of an op amp application, and asked to calculate the gain. I launched into a discussion of internal gain, input frquencies, what part number, and with that I could proceed. When the interviewer challenged me about that, since 741s were pretty simple, I spouted off a dozen part numbers I knew from the military equipment I was trained on, and that I assumed we were not talking about VHF/UHF applications, but probably audio, which two of the exotics I knew of were commonly used in signal processing. He gave in, I knew enough to know which leads to probe for what I wanted to know.
Mind you, this was for fixing calculators (no op amps there) and tape recorders (not yet using ICs), but he wanted to protect his employer from obvious rubes. I managed somehow to hold down that bench for 7 years before they folded the service department when calculators were no longer worth 15 minutes of work.
But two random questions at the border isn't doing much.
On another phone interview years and years later, after working in the desert sun for 6 hours, I was asked Novell questions for a GroupWise admin slot. I blanked on remembering NWAdmin was the primary tool for managing NetWare domains. Darn, that was a great opportunity. two weeks later I was hired for a temp job at Intel racking new servers, and no one including the full timers knew how to access and manage the EFI preboot. Got me two weeks of interesting work before we got those done and moved on to an unending stream of Proliant slices and obsolete images to be fixed without any real support. No one asked me about EFI during the interview process. No one really knew what the job would be, just that I could describe DHCP and iLO operation...
Random questions are tough. I feel for Celestine.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I am a Mexican, and I don't consider myself prone to confuse data types.
Also, mindwhip's version makes sense in many, many C-derived languages where every statement is evaluated to a truth value. Of course, setting interesting=true makes this code less useful for multi-story usage. I would use story.mark_as_interesting() or story.interesting=true... But that's just sugar :-]
Pro tip: when you decide to argue, read a source before citing it. The first sentence on the page you linked to says:
"an abstract type is a type in a nominative type system that cannot be instantiated directly"
Which happens to be more or less exactly what I said:
"That's actually basically the definition of an abstract function (method). The presence of an abstract function makes the entire group of functions and the struct which points to them non-instanceable."
Let's continue to the second sentence as well. Wiki says:
"Every instance of an abstract type is an instance of some concrete subtype."
I said the same, giving an example:
"The standard example, the 'hello world' of abstract classes I've always seen is Animal. You can't create a generic Animal, you have to subclass to some specific type of Animal."
Third sentence, Wiki says:
"An abstract type may provide no implementation, or an incomplete implementation."
Raymorris said:
An abstract class has *some* abstract methods. An abstract method doesn't provide an implementation. (In other words, the implementation of the class is missing or incomplete.)
Would you care to continue to the fourth sentence?
Trump is just making good on his promise -- EXTREME vetting.
It's just sad no one vetted Trump.
I believe 62 million Americans vetted him through a process called voting.
I wrote "IT Consultant" on the immigration form when entering Costa Rica. To my surprise, the officer started asking what kind of failure a distinct clcking noise coming from the hard drive is. I was impressed that they seemed to have upped the ante on immigration checks!
Turns out that his kid's computer was doing the clicking, and he was desperate for some information on what to do. Nice guy!
Pura Vida.
Almost 65 came to the opposite conclusion. But you go ahead and hang with the people who pee down their legs 24 hours a day.
The real question to me is how a customs guy knew enough to make any sense of the answers.
And if he did, what is he doing working for customs?
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
The correct answer was the one that matched the answer he had on his piece of paper.
The only reason us employers want African engineers is to underpay them. There are 1000s of qualified under employed engineers that were born here. SCABS DESERVE EVERYTHING THEY GET. US STUDENTS HAD TO PAY $100,000s of dollars for US COLLEGE, THEY CAN'T COMPLETE ON WAGE PRICE EVEN IF THEY WANTED TO.
Go fuck yourself.
He was a database programmer prior to his job getting outsourced and having to get a job with the TSA, so he is now exacting his revenge. His B-Tree balancing skills were legendary, but only in the abstract sense.
But seriously, you guys are fucked up.