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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.
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 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.
you fail.. the answer is
if (story) { interesting = true }
[The Universe] has gone offline.
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.
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.
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?
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"
The correct answer to all of these questions is "why don't you look on stackoverflow?"
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...
Surely it would have been easier to check if he was an engineer by forcing him to try to talk to a girl?
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++
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.
I am impressed with the questions. These are questions that any competent programmer should be able to answer, but a non-programmer (such as a shoe or underwear bomber) would not have a clue. This actually seems like a pretty good test. If they did this to me, I would be more pissed about having to sit around for over an hour beforehand. Of course, it wouldn't happen to me because, hey, I'm white.
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.
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?
interesting = story;
FTFY
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
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 am impressed with the questions. These are questions that any competent programmer should be able to answer, but a non-programmer (such as a shoe or underwear bomber) would not have a clue. This actually seems like a pretty good test.
Call me incompetent, then. I've been making a decent living as a software engineer in this country for 25 years, having graduated from a reasonably prestigious school with a 4 years CS degree. Not once since college have I ever had a need to write code to construct or balance a tree on my own. I doubt very much that I could come up with a function to balance a tree out of the blue with no prep or review, nor is there much real world need for most developers to do so.
They don't need to know if he got the question correct to be a 95% accurate test. They just need to see how he behaves when given the problem. Very few people can and will bullshit confidently in such a circumstance.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Um, no, technically he wasn't in the country yet, he had yet to clear immigration and customs. There are a LOT of people who transit though a US airport who are never technically IN the United States even if they are on US soil. They are afforded the privilege of "passing though" to change planes as they move on to another destination and we don't require visa's. Not everybody is granted this, but for the most part we don't care who you are if you are not staying.
Many countries allow this at major airports. Technically you don't legally enter the country (and don't have to meet their entry requirements) but you must stay within the designated area of the airport until you clear immigration. It's how Snowden got stuck at the Moscow airport in transit after the USA pulled his passport. He got stuck because he couldn't (and didn't want to) get on a plane w/o a passport, couldn't enter Russia unless they let him in.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
I am impressed with the questions. These are questions that any competent programmer should be able to answer, but a non-programmer (such as a shoe or underwear bomber) would not have a clue. This actually seems like a pretty good test.
Call me incompetent, then. I've been making a decent living as a software engineer in this country for 25 years, having graduated from a reasonably prestigious school with a 4 years CS degree. Not once since college have I ever had a need to write code to construct or balance a tree on my own. I doubt very much that I could come up with a function to balance a tree out of the blue with no prep or review, nor is there much real world need for most developers to do so.
Not to mention after 24-30 hours on a plane.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
Except, you know, an expert at getting through borders undetected, or anyone who has experience with social engineering...
So congrats, you weeded out the amateur criminals, and have a false sense of security about the professional ones.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
All security can be bypassed by a sufficient expert. That's just how security works. But almost all criminals are idiots, and are easily caught by simple methods.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They didn't ask him to write an entire balancing algorithm, they asked him for an algorithm to tell if the tree was balanced - a much simpler task, left as an exercise to the reader.
That is all.
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).
Why not? If he's good at VHDL, he'll be fine.
Why wouldn't I want to hire a micro-controller programmer who didn't know what an abstract class was?
Would you hire a C++ programmer who didn't know what an SPI port was?
Play Command HQ online
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.
Of course it's been happening for a long time. Obama sent more illegals back home than all previous Presidents combined.
None of that mattered.
When Trump became President, suddenly this is a big deal.
I heard the news today talking about the SEAL operation in Yemen where one of our sailors died. They're picking it apart trying to figure out if the operation was a "success", "worth it", etc. What a welcome change after 8 years of nobody talking about *anything* that happened in the Middle East because we had to pretend that the Nobel Peace Prize winner wasn't actually bombing the shit out of something like 5 different countries with drones, killing kids and anyone else who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm guessing that's going to suddenly be a big fucking deal again.
Do you have ESP?
Recursion is always the answer:
Nope. FAIL!
Your implementation only works for trees where all leaf nodes are at the same depth.
A binary tree is still balanced if one branch is depth n depth and the other branch is depth n+1.
So you have to compare like this:
(abs(depthLeft - depthRight) <= 1)) {
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.
The US Government should be as picky when they hire political cronies that provide goods and services.
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.