Software Engineer Detained At JFK, Given Test To Prove He's An Engineer (mashable.com) 553
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."
USA! USA! USA! (Score:5, Funny)
We're Number #1! /s
Re:USA! USA! USA! (Score:5, Funny)
This is completely justified.
We shouldn't let anyone into the country who can't write a procedure to tell if a Binary Search Tree is balanced, or doesn't know what an abstract class is.
Re: USA! USA! USA! (Score:5, Funny)
I know I know! An abstract class is one where they talk about binary search trees!
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No that there is funny!
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It's a .h with no .c (an interface) (Score:4, 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).
Could return any type. Standard example Animal (Score:3)
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.
Re:USA! USA! USA! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:USA! USA! USA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well... I didn't want to go there anyway.
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This is completely justified.
We shouldn't let anyone into the country who can't write a procedure to tell if a Binary Search Tree is balanced, or doesn't know what an abstract class is.
I agree. In fact we should go a step further. We should start revoking US citizenship and deporting folks who cannot write the same. A much smarter nation will result.
Re: USA! USA! USA! (Score:4, Insightful)
Like it or not that's what a sane immigration policy looks like.
Lol no sane immigration policy has border patrol agents administering visas at the border. This shit woulda been done when the visa was issued waaay before he gets to the border.
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So a second line of questions are in place to ensure the visa and person are correct when entering the USA.
The next step will be biometric. Biometrics matches the visa application, the person at the embassy and that person entering the USA are the same.
The person then returning home from the USA is the person who entered. The US will soon do what every normal nation has been
Re: USA! USA! USA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most nations are smart and know that just having one part of a gov giving out a visa in another nation is not really that secure.
No actually they do not know that because that is what every government I have ever applied for a visa from has done. How is this any less secure than a passport?
So a second line of questions are in place to ensure the visa and person are correct when entering the USA.
This second line of questions needs to be ones that the border guard is qualified to ask and understand the answer to. Such as who you are, what your business is etc. Having an unqualified individual trying to ask technical questions they do not understand is just stupid. When I worked at Fermilab 10+ years ago a colleague of mine was stopped at the US border and when he said he was a physicist the guard got out a large book, flipped through it, and asked him what "potential energy" was but, despite answering correctly, because he did not reproduce the exact answer given in the book he almost got denied entry.
By all means protect your borders but please do it in a sensible, effective manner.
Re: USA! USA! USA! (Score:5, 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.
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And others do not... China, for example. Most EU countries if staying more than 90 days. Much of the Middle East. And some countries, like Thailand, have different rules; if you're entering as a US citizen for tourism, no visa for up to 30 days. For business? You need a visa. Peru was the same way. When I went to visit as a tourist, no problem. When I went to do business, I had to have a visa.
Actually, you're rather wrong--what you don't need to do is apply for a tourist visa in some countries. What they put in your passport when you're entering is a visa, and it's automatically issued to people from certain countries. The deal is typically reciprocal, though you're not necessarily certain of getting one--usually, from what I've heard, it's when you've gone and come back to try to 'renew' your tourist visa. (If there's a formal/proper process, it's so well-hidden as to be practically not exis
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Like it or not that's what a sane immigration policy looks like.
While I agree with that, this wasn't immigration, this was a short-term work visa. I guess it's the equivalent of the Canadian border guys saying "what exactly will you be doing and why can't a Canadian do that?", except we probably didn't apologize afterwards.
In What Language? (Score:4, Insightful)
Write something in Forth.
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Brainfuck should be better for this case.
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Even bettter, APL. It's not humanly readable.
Re:In What Language? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:In What Language? (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense. They have tasers. They could keep themselves amused all night.
You, on the other hand, might enjoy it less.
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I wonder what the eye diagram for a taser's waveform would look like.
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Perhaps then you would like to explain how to force X Windows/Debian Linux to output over HDMI regardless of the CEC and EDID data (or lack thereof) coming back over the link?
Two of the banes of my existence are 1) that if I power off an HDMI TV attached to a Linux box and then power it back on some hours later (e.g. for use with MythTV) I am unable to get any output from X unless I reboot the system and 2) that if I power up a Linux box without an attached and powered on HDMI TV (e.g. digital signage which
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CEC doesn't matter.
X11 reads the EDID and parses it itself, you can override the modes all you want.
The output selection is controlled by the driver. Some drivers tend to be monolithic and kind of a pain to alter the policy, like the VideoCore (Broadcom/Raspberry Pi) or NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Others should be pretty straight forward like the Intel drivers, as there are tables in the laptop firmware that describe the routing and the open source driver knows how to find them.
I power off HDMI TVs and powe
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An abstract class is offered at an art school.
I gotta think of everything.
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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.
So very true. Arrays, vectors, lists, hash tables, maps, stacks? Depending on the language, I've interacted with all of those and similar structures on a regular basis. But graphs, trees, and heaps? Other than allocating memory from the heap, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a single time I've directly interacted with any of them since leaving grad school, and the notion that my entry into a country could be denied because of that is appalling. If a customs agent decided to start grilling me over something l
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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.
I've found that this typically works as they are usually just asking you questions to see if you sweat or have trouble answering them. Even for tourists, they'll ask what you are really looking forward to seeing or what you really liked about your trip. I've found that if you already have something in mind and can just wax endlessly about it till they tell you 'that's enough', that that will also be the end of the interview and they'll let you go. I wouldn't be surprised if in earlier questioning, he was as
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I'm pretty sure "pink" would have been an acceptable answer... how the hell is someone in border protection going to know if the answer was right or not?
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{B = "4"} {"may the with you" = B}
Crowdsourcing! (Score:5, Funny)
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¦
Shorter lines? (Score:2)
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...
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After all, we're the land of the free...
YOU are.
HE isn't.
Israel has been doing this (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.
Creative answers (Score:3, Funny)
In light of the previous story (Score:2)
TSA knows? (Score:3)
Re:TSA knows? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the ensuing game of telephone the declared needs changed. Questions that probably should have been as simple as "What extra include is necessary in C++ over C" and "What is an IDE?" which very few non-programmers could answer anyway were replaced with ones that are harder to answer.
It's actually not an entirely bad idea to confirm that someone coming in for a specific reason for a specific class of visa is here for legitimate purposes, but if the Government is issuing th visas in the first place then it should not be difficult to know what kinds of questions need to be asked, so that there isn't an hour delay, and so that the questions are considered and reasonable.
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It's actually not an entirely bad idea to confirm that someone coming in for a specific reason for a specific class of visa is here for legitimate purposes,
The story is opaque as to the actual visa involved, calling it only a "short term" visa. I would expect someone coming here to work would not have a short-term visa to start with, so that makes it suspicious. "Software engineer" is such a broad field that seems like a reasonable career for someone trying to enter illegally to pick. I mean, just how could ICE verify? Well, they tried, and I think it was reasonable to question him.
They also called his employer, which I suspect is why he got loosed.
but if the Government is issuing th visas in the first place then it should not be difficult to know what kinds of questions need to be asked,
Ummm, the
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The most surprising in this story that Custom officers were able to come up with the quoted questions.
I used to have a very controlling and secretive boss - he had very little technical knowledge, but he did not want people to know that.
For a long time, he would not let the rest of us participate in interviews of job applicants. Instead, he would come to each of us and have us give him questions and answers. I remember one time he asked me to come up with several perl coding questions and answers (my boss did not know perl, but it was a requirement for the position being filled).
So I am reasonably sure the
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I'd fail that binary search tree test (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If I have to write a full red-black tree, then I'm in trouble.
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That's not how you check whether a binary tree is balanced.
The answer in the other part of the thread is wrong as well.
It's scary how some so-called "software engineers" can't even solve such a trivial problem.
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I always wonder why we were taught AVL trees in CS, but not red-black trees
Might have been your particular professor didn't like them?
proctologists and gyanecologist (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what kind of tests do they give them.
Re:proctologists and gyanecologist (Score:4, Funny)
Not at the border (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Getting Visa [visa.com] is no brainer.
The correct answer: look on stack overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
The correct answer to all of these questions is "why don't you look on stackoverflow?"
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The correct answer is that solving the problem would incur a consulting fee, but you are not allowed to work on a tourist visa (or as a visitor under a visa waiver program), so he'll have to ask someone else.
I'd fail both questions, and I'm a USAian! (Score:2)
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...
Easier test (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easier test (Score:4, Funny)
Torture is forbidden by law.
Most of the time anyways.
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Would this be torture for the engineer, or torture for the girl?
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Would this be torture for the engineer, or torture for the girl?
Yes.
Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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:
Nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
French historian detained for 10 hours
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/... [cnn.com]
Australian Children's author detained
http://www.smh.com.au/entertai... [smh.com.au]
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French historian detained for 10 hours
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/... [cnn.com]
Australian Children's author detained
http://www.smh.com.au/entertai... [smh.com.au]
Both of those stories are from this week. I think that qualifies them as "new".
Fuck, ship me tp Qatar ... (Score:2)
...
"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'.
Almost nobody needs know how to balance a B-Tree (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Maybe he took a wrong turn ... (Score:2)
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. ]
Economic war (Score:3)
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 government should be as picky... (Score:3)
The US Government should be as picky when they hire political cronies that provide goods and services.
Re:Interesting story (Score:4, Funny)
you fail.. the answer is
if (story) { interesting = true }
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No wonder we have so many bugs in software...
if (story == true) { story = interesting; }
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FTFY
Re:Interesting story (Score:5, 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.
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We've got some smart border agents.
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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.
Re:Interesting story (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Perhaps you are in denial? [independent.co.uk]
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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.
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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?
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They didn't say, "programmer." They said, "engineer."
Re:Interesting story (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Interesting story (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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.
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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)) {
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You aren't in the country until you get through customs.
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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 airpo
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Re:Interesting story (Score:4, Funny)
Recursion is always the answer:
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24 hours doesn't seem too unlikely.
I've spent 4 hours on an airplane for a 1 hour flight. We got on, got held for an hour on the ramp waiting to depart, then upon arrival got stuck for 2 hours while a series of thunderstorms rolled though and nobody could go near any aircraft for safety reasons to do things like push backs, luggage transfer, blue water removal ect...
I've also know of trips by air that took 36 hours from original departure to arrival at final destination that involved multiple stops in va
Re:Interesting story (Score:5, 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 [linkedin.com] 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.
Re:Not in the summary: (Score:5, Insightful)
That's something that should be checked before issuing a Visa, not after they're already on the fucking plane here.
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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?
Re:Not in the summary: (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Not in the summary: (Score:4)
This.
The 911 airplanes were hijacked by, among others, ______. (hint: pilots)
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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, [uscis.gov] 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
Re:He's lucky it wasn't Canada (Score:5, Informative)
And then the officer who fired the tazer went to prison for 30 months. Nice of you to leave that out.
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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/... [wikipedia.org]
Nice of you to leave that out.
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You've been stuck in Customs? For 30+ minutes? I usually walk through the "Nothing to Declare" side. Which usually takes about 10 seconds.
Now Passport Control is another thing entirely. Passport Control and Customs are two very different things. I can totally see being quizzed for lengthy periods of time at Passport Control. (Even if it's never happened to me.)
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There is a huge difference between being grilled on what you *actually do on a day-to-day basis* and what *people with similar job titles have to answer in interviews*. See other posts from software engineers (presumably gainfully employed) who haven't had to deal w
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All caps is EXTREME VENTING!