Slashdot Mirror


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."

10 of 553 comments (clear)

  1. Israel has been doing this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:He's lucky it wasn't Canada by SirSlud · · Score: 5, Informative

    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"
  3. Re:Interesting story by _merlin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Interesting story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
  5. Re:He's lucky it wasn't Canada by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Nothing new by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
  7. Re:Interesting story by Idarubicin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  8. Re:USA! USA! USA! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Re: USA! USA! USA! by PCM2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  10. It's a .h with no .c (an interface) by raymorris · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).