A software engineer was detained by U.S. Customs and given a test to prove hes an engineer

[lunasun]

After a few minutes of grilling him about the job, the border agent escorted Omin into a small room and told him to sit down. Another hour passed before a different customs officer came in.

“Your visa says you are a software engineer. Is that correct?” the officer asked Omin in an tone the engineer described as accusatory. When Omin said it was right, the officer presented him with a piece of paper and a pen and told him to answer the following questions:

“Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced.”

“What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”
To Omin — who now hadn’t slept in more than 24 hours — the questions seemed opaque and could have multiple answers. While he is a skilled software engineer with more than seven years of experience, Omin later tells me that the questions looked to him like someone with no technical background Googled something like, “Questions to ask a software engineer.”

(The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment made by LinkedIn over phone and email by the time this story went to press.)

With no context or guidelines on how to answer the questions, Omin, “too tired to even think,” sat down and tried his best. But when he handed his answers back after about 10 minutes of work, the official told him his answers were wrong. “No one would tell me why I was being questioned,” Omin told me by phone. “Every single time I asked [the official] why he was asking me these questions, he hushed me … I wasn’t prepared for this. If I had known this was happening beforehand, I would have tried to prepare."
https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14764064/nigerian-software-engineer-detained-by-us-customs

[malaise]

1. He paid for a visa at the US embassy in wherever

He was already questioned. This is effin' madness

[Rex]

2. Not a police state.

Well kinda like one. This is horrible. Trump is an abomination, causing chaos and destruction like a good little Russian Troll.

Pathetic, sad and wrong.

[lapfog_1]

3. I refused to do this sort of test as part of an interview process at Google

I've written software for nearly my whole life... over 50 years of software development.

I have numerous patents in the field. I was a Chief Scientist for NASA for 10 years.

I founded and sold a company that pioneered the fields of online backups and what is now known as dedup ( or the art of reducing storage by recognizing that the same "chunk" of data was previously stored so all one needs is a reference to the previous chunk, thus saving storage and networking ).

I was Chief Architect at one of the few remaining disk drive companies on the planet.

I would NOT be able to answer that question at the spur of the moment and I would ( and have ) refused to do that sort of thing as part of a prepared interview ( Those companies can and should look up my published papers, my patents, and my references ).

The answer to the first question is a study of recursion... basically you follow left and right pointers for every node in the tree (balanced binary trees have a left and right pointer to another element... and they may have a value associated with the element). As you follow the left node you recursively call the same left recursion function and add "1" to the "balance count". When there are no more nodes, you follow the right recursion branch and subtract "1" from the balance count. The tree is perfectly balanced when all recursion ends (no more left or right branches to follow) and the count is 0.

Of course, this is a stupid test. There is no useful information to be gained by knowing the tree is perfectly balanced... what you really want to know is HOW the tree is not balanced. This means a width first search instead of my described depth first search. For example, if the tree reaches level 4 and loses the right most balance but continues a perfectly balanced left branch for another 20 levels... the tree is waay out of balance but this method will only tell you "1" not that the tree became unbalanced at level 4.

I really hope we regain sanity soon.

And I'm certain that the morons at ICE have no idea what I just wrote in answer to their insulting question.

[Volaris]

4. I'd sue the fuck out of this administration if I were him OR his employer.

[Tanuki]

5. Reminds me of the crap that voter registrars in the deep south

used to exclude African Americans from the voter rolls in the bad old days.

[littlemissmartypants]

6. Exactly.

[Lucinda]

7. WTF

[Mendocino]

8. Like an old WWII movie

"So Fritz, who hit the game winning HR in game 3 of the 39 World Series ?"

[NotThisTime]

9. These are fair questions if you write in Java, if C, C++, SQL,Oracle database design and development

NOT exactly a fair set of questions. Do they know there are different languages and different types of software design? No, no they don't. WTF....