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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."
Brainfuck should be better for this case.
I can't call that English
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.
And then the officer who fired the tazer went to prison for 30 months. Nice of you to leave that out.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I had something similar although less exciting happen to me in early 2004. On claiming to be an electrical engineer, the immigration agent or whatever the US calls him scrawled a physics equation on a piece of paper and asked me what it meant to me. He was satisfied with whatever explanation I gave and let me through. I don't know if they've always done this, or if it's a post-9/11 thing, but it's been happening for more than a decade.
Perhaps you are in denial?
And then the officer who fired the tazer went to prison for 30 months. Nice of you to leave that out.
He didn't go to jail for 30 months for the death or firing the taser.
He went to jail for 30 months for perjury and colluding with his fellow officers before testifying:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Nice of you to leave that out.
No wonder we have so many bugs in software...
if (story == true) { story = interesting; }
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?
No commercial airline flight is 24 hours. There used to be a 19 hour one for a Singapore to New York flight but that's no longer in service.
The Mashable report quoted in the Slashdot summary uses a slightly different phrasing from the original LinkedIn report. The LinkedIn article actually says "after having spent 24 hours cramped in an economy seat on Qatar Airways".
Poking around a bit on Kayak, I see a bunch of Qatar Airways itineraries from Lagos, Nigeria (LOS) to JFK that involve three segments, with stops in Doha, Qatar (DOH) and western Europe (CDG, FCO, MAN, etc.). Total travel time is 27 or 28 hours, with nominal times in flight adding up to about 23 hours. Add an hour in a holding pattern somewhere (or queued up for takeoff on a taxiway, or waiting for a gate to open up), and the poor guy could easily have spent 24 hours in an economy-class seat on his way to JFK. Yeah, the phrasing's a bit sneaky since he would have had a couple of short "intermissions" to stretch his legs...but still, if we figure he arrived at LOS two hours before his flight, he would have been stuck in the international air transport system for better (worse?) than thirty hours all told.
~Idarubicin
I don't know what an abstract class is or why it's useful. I write in C, not whatever language is hot shit in Current Year(tm). I can, however, balance a binary search tree, so I guess I'm half eligible to not get deported.
You know, in isolation, I complete agree with this.
However, this didn't happen in isolation. It happened in an environment where this same organization (part of the Executive branch) has just been found by the Ninth Circuit courts to be attempting to specifically ban as many adherents of a specific religion as they could, including people from this same country, on a transparently flimsy legal pretext. The Administration isn't appealing it any further, which is essentially and admission. This is as close to an objective truth on a political matter as the US legal system has.
So harassing a valid Visa holder from this same country, in context, no longer looks particularly innocent. It looks very much like someone possibly literally being in contempt of court.
Lol no sane immigration policy has border patrol agents administering visas at the border.
Traveling on a U.S. passport, I've been to several countries where yes, they do indeed issue you a visa at the border.
Breakfast served all day!
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).
It happened in an environment where this same organization (part of the Executive branch) has just been found by the Ninth Circuit courts to be attempting to specifically ban as many adherents of a specific religion as they could,
First, the executive order suspending immigration did not do so based on religion, only on citizenship in seven specific countries. There was an exemption for refugees from religious persecution, but no mention of Islam or muslims at all.
Second, the Ninth Circuit made no such finding in their stay. In fact, the article you linked to was quite explicit in saying exactly the opposite:
The Administration isn't appealing it any further, which is essentially and admission.
"And [sic] admission" of what? And they haven't YET appealed it, but that does not mean it will never be appealed. In fact, the article you linked to explained why it might not be appealed immediately. Did you read it?
So harassing a valid Visa holder from this same country, in context, no longer looks particularly innocent.
You know, I hope, that a stay on an immigration policy that bars admission temporarily does NOT mean that there can be no barriers at all to immigration?
It looks very much like someone possibly literally being in contempt of court.
It looks like no such thing, once you understand what the executive order actually says, and what the court said about it. The court did not stay any and all immigration policies or practices for those seven countries, just the limited set defined by the executive order.