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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.
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.
"What is an abstract class, and why do you need it"
Not a very FORTH friendly question. I'm an old C programmer and while I could make an educated guess, I don't think I would be able to confidently answer the question after a long flight.
Checking if a binary search tree is balanced is something a student has to do, you usually have to write these sorts of things once or twice in your entire career.
On the other hand I could sit down and discuss HDMI specification all day and night with border agents. They'd likely pass out from boredom.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Nonsense. They have tasers. They could keep themselves amused all night.
You, on the other hand, might enjoy it less.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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?"
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.
French historian detained for 10 hours
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/...
Australian Children's author detained
http://www.smh.com.au/entertai...
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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.
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.
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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