US border guards can’t believe Nigerian man is a software engineer, google “questions to ask a software engineer” and give him a pop quiz
Celestine Omin is a Nigerian software engineer who works for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s company Andela, founded to give talented African coders an entree into the leading American tech firms; this week, he flew to the USA on a B1/B2 visa to meet with the company, but he found himself detained at the border.
The CBP guards who detained Omin after his 24-hour flight were skeptical that he was a real software engineer. They apparently googled “quizzes to give to software engineers” and told him to answer ten questions (e.g. “Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced” and “What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”) to gain entry into the country.
The ordeal ended when a CBP officer called Andela and confirmed that Omin was an engineer.
https://boingboing.net/2017/03/01/what-is-your-favorite-color.html
creeping dystopia, but I gotta say I wish border guards would give me a pop quiz like that, I’d love it and I’d bore them to tears
My dad’s a philosopher and has been quizzed on philosophy by border guards before. And while I haven’t gotten the full-on quiz treatment, I usually get something along the lines of “why are you going to [location?]” “Study abroad.” “Oh, what are you studying?” “Math.” “What kind of math?” “Number theory and combinatorics.” “Cool; have a great day!”
My dad, like me, is about as white as you can get (something like sixth-generation Irish-German Americans), so I’m not at all convinced this is a race thing. I was under the impression it was pretty common, when entering under a visa for a specific purpose, to be asked a couple of pseudo-small-talk questions about it to see if you have suspicious trouble answering or are otherwise Acting Oddly, and occasionally given a more thorough quiz.
Honestly, this seems like a pretty reasonable way of doing something that isn’t racial profiling, while still letting the guards feel like they are Doing Something (and possibly even Actually Doing Something, who knows); someone who’s traveling legitimately won’t have a problem answering “what is an abstract class” or “name a major work of Kant” or the equivalent for their work visa, while someone who isn’t will be lost.
(Of course, you’re going to get some false positives. My dad is amazingly bad at this sort of screening. Once they asked him ‘where are you coming from’ and he couldn’t decide whether to say ‘the US’ or ‘Texas’ and stood there contemplating for an extended period of time. The guards, reasonably enough, found this somewhat suspicious, and he got a pretty extensive grilling before they let him go through.)
I’m having a great time imagining them trying to quiz your father on philosophy. “Oh, you say you’re a philosopher, eh? Well, if you’re really a philosopher, then you’ll be able to explain to me how internal symbols can be grounded in external reality without requiring an infinite regress of mediating mental entities.”