Australian software engineer got asked algorithm question when entering US

>Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator. Before you go, you’re given a fake passport and character sheet telling you your profession, your family situation, etc. It’s pretty easy to answer questions like “how long have you been working as a photographer?” or “how did you meet your wife?” but a lot more difficult to prepare for questions like “What is the best lense for close ups?”

Hopefully for the estranged brother, Mr. Hitman doesn't happen to enjoy a photography hobby in his spare time. :)

Then again, high-end assassins are probably adept at photography anyways. Part of their job is planning, and that involves surveilling targets prior.

Whether it's "par for the course" or not, this requires us to trust that every immigration officer in service is enough of an expert in every field of endeavor to A) come up with relevant questions and B) judge quality of answers.

The likelihood of that being true is incredibly low. What's worse, we know that typically people specialize within fields; a kernel hacker probably knows nothing whatsoever about using Ruby on Rails, but that might be the question the border agent googles up (or the web dev might get asked about kernel APIs).

Plus: making excuses for this makes you complicit in whatever evil it begets, so maybe you should stop making excuses for it.

How is the CBP official supposed to know the actual answer if they haven't been to software engineering school?

I've been asked my profession a number of times on entering the US (as a visitor - not on a work permit). I'm an electrical engineer, but my response is usually just "engineer". Electrical engineering is such an incredibly broad profession, including everything from chip designers to radio engineers to power systems. Just how many quizzes is CBP going to have design to cover every branch of my profession and not deny an antenna designer entry because he doesn't know anything about power transformers?

I understand what you're saying, but there are a few issues with this:

1. There are many accounts exactly to the opposite, non-US citizens having traveled to and from the US for decades without this level of questioning. If there is a policy change, then it should be clear to travelers; such a change doesn't just affect non-citizens, citizens working to bring in employees, guest lecturers, business associates, etc, are made to look foolish as well when they can't arrange the meeting. They don't have to publish the questions at all, but there should be some guarantee that the CBP is actually qualified to judge the answers.

2. Most of this should be done by the consular at the embassy when you apply for the visa, well before you even get to the border. CBP guards see dozens of persons each day with a wide breadth of employment backgrounds - is it really required by these guards to be that knowledgable in so many subjects to perform their duties? Or is it arbitrary checks based on what the guard themselves knows? The contention with this is that no one knows what the actual policy is, so it's hard to say whether or not the guards are doing checks they're supposed to be doing or if the guard even has the requisite knowledge themselves to judge a yes/no of an answer. A questionnaire for professions is equally troubling since, as many can recount with recruiters marking perfectly sound answer as "wrong" because the answers weren't what was written on the sheet, or the recruiter didn't understand the answer.

3. Some of the criteria are really strange for using to judge whether or not someone is telling the truth - the qualifier mentioned elsewhere in the discussion about asking someone's wife what her husband worked on seems pretty asinine; how many people from the DC area tell their spouses by requirement they work for the DoD and nothing more? How many contractors that land a government contract are 100% open with their spouses about what they work on? Certainly other governments have similar restrictions and NDAs for their employees/contractors. Or even once you start to get into specialized topics, how much can your spouse really understand about what you're doing if they're not in the same field? For a simple example, I work in just IT support, and my partner is fairly computer illiterate. If pressed, she probably could tell someone I work with databases, but not much beyond that, even though I've explained what I do at her request multiple times. I get there can be levels of validation here (does she at least confirm he's a programmer), but the validity of such a test question really depends on a lot of variables, and the value judgement of "how much should they know" will change drastically depending on very common circumstances.

People are quick to pin this on the Trump Administration because it is taking a very hard stance towards immigration and not addressing the issue at hand. While it may be individual guards being emboldened into getting this aggressive, the question becomes why is the administration not making a statement on it? Why has the CBP not made a statement one way or another on whether these are legitimate actions? With the EU planning to end free-travel for US citizens and the Trump Administration trying to play hardball with the deal, it's pretty easy to wonder why the current administration isn't dealing with something that a lot of people find to be ridiculous and wrong. With a president that is willing to tweet and comment about celebrity impersonations and individual news stories, it seems strange that they'd turn a blind eye to something that has a major impact on US relations with the entire rest of the world, especially since there are numbers to show that interest in US travel is declining.

As a final aside, international flights, especially trans-atlantic, can be pretty rough on sleep schedules and just in general. I just went from St. Petersburg Russia to Seoul, and I'm not sure that I'd be able to answer difficult questions about my profession on the spot without some time or resources. It's pretty bizarre too since entering Korea took about 30 seconds at the passport control. I'm a US citizen and I haven't even been able to enter the US that quickly in all my travels.

There's plenty of professions a con can claim without this problem: an uber/taxi driver, hotel receptionist, child tutor, retail worker, farmers market vendor, stay at home parent, a convenience store, valet, or gas station attendant, a mall cop or bouncer at a bar...

This is classic security theater. Inconveniencing legitimate people while leaving gaping holes for any actual crook to exploit.

In politics and bureaucracies, orchestrating a perception is more important than instrumenting a reality.

> “What is the best lense for close ups?”

It's just point and shoot really.

This may have been par for the course in the past, but the threat has moved on some time ago. Most of the 9/11 hijackers, we're talking 2001, were professionals with advanced technical degrees. Several of them had PhDs. Asking these questions may help with an imagined problem, but I suspect the value is limited in practice.

And it being par for the course does not excuse Trump from blame for having his departments use it in an arena where it has been proved ineffective.

    > Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying. 
    > To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how 
    > to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer 
    > without actually being in that profession.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas

Edit: formatting

Got Spy around.. shouldn't be mention .. I'm malaysian

> Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator

I'd go on a tourist visa. Why would I run the risk of being denied on a business visa?

So what if he'd been a windows device driver dev? Does ICE have domain experts for all the various engineering professions? I'm gonna guess no.

Let's say I am a Python/Django programmer, travelling for work.

You expect me to know how to balance a b-tree without referring to Stack Overflow?

Could he have just been getting some sneaky help with his college homework?

That's a lot better than balancing a BST like that other guy got.

What were you denied entry for previously?

If the sun is bigger than 100 what?

Sum* Sorry!

> I think the basic idea - questioning people about things they ought to know, given who they claim to be - is a good one.

It's an awful idea. False negatives. Discriminates against people with harder professions. Wouldn't keep out determined people

> One cannot but wonder what happens if you answer the question in a different manner than that suggested by Wikipedia or whichever resource the CBP draws their questions from.

They're looking at your overall attitude, not checking your knowledge of trivia. Answering the question about inverting a binary tree wrongly still means you understand what "binary tree" is and can at least come up with a couple of sentences with that term that sound coherent and resemble what is written in Wikipedia in broadest terms. For comparison, ask your non-engineering friends to answer the same question, even to try to fake an answer as best as they can.

I think it's common, and that's part of the tactic, to see if you're lying. Not based on your answer, but based on your reaction.

In 2004, I wanted to drive to Canada with a friend. She was from out of town and hadn't brought her passport. I wanted to go anyway, so I just left my passport at home as well and drove up there anyway. (I remember the pre-9/11 days and figured, no big deal, even though they CLAIM you can't get back into the US without one).

The border agent coming back into the US asked us each a rapidfire series of questions meant to throw you off.

"Where were you born? How long did you live there? What's the major industry in that town?" All quickly, before you even really had a chance to finish your answer.

After asking us each a few questions he just smiled and thanked us and waved us through.

Hey there!

I am the subject of the article and to my knowledge I wasn't 'assessed' in any formal capacity (certainly not at the level of cross-referencing anything with Wikipedia)

I am thoroughly convinced that just getting down and putting code on paper in a confident way got me across that border!

So, if I had any advice for others it would be to do what you normally do in a software interview: act really convincing - even if you're a bit flustered!

I strongly suspect that they actually look at how you react and behave when presented with the problem rather than what the solution actually is.

I know it's popular to view border guards as complete dolts interfering with everyone's day, but they certainly deserve a bit more credit for what they do.

> Also the fact that he's Australian is a reassuring proof they don't base these question on color of skin...

-To their credit, looking caucasian while coming from Australia strongly suggest that your family has a history of trouble with the authorities... ;)

For argument's sake, suppose it is fair to ask such questions. What happens if you code the problem out in Java but it doesn't match the official answer written in Python? Fail?

What happens if you design an algo with O(N-LogN) but the official answer is O(N^2) -- do you get bonus points or fail?

Is this true ? I have entered the US at least 30 times on H1 and never been asked anything like this and have never heard anything like this from my friends either

What does being Australian have to do with the color of his skin?

I have never been in the US, but I always thought it's the personnel in embassies who are educated/qualified to check and (in)validate my visa documentation. Once on a border, they will only check that I'm not carrying anything illegal, and that's it.

But the idea that my education/knowledge/experience will be checked again, that's weird to me.

Key piece of missing information that is not in the article but is linked to it: he was entering as a tourist, not on a work permit. The guy just wanted to tour around New York for a week, not work under a specialized visa.

The guy was entering on a ESTA for tourism.

> Also the fact that he's Australian is a reassuring proof they don't base these question on color of skin...

White Australian gets asked to print the sum of two numbers. [0]

Black Nigerian gets asked how to balance a binary tree. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795363

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-immigrat...

I've had the same experience for the most part with a few exceptions. It's unfortunate and I'm not sure about the root cause but you are right. Of course I've met a lot of immigration/customs officials from around the world who are also pretty intimidating. I wonder if the job attracts people who enjoy having this kind of power over people. Or if maybe after getting the job, they are changed by knowing that they can very easily, on a whim, make life very hard for someone.

What bothers me more than the US immigration and customs people are the security employees - TSA. I've seen many more of them be well past cold. They are often rude. I've seen them yelling at visitors to the US who are just trying to get through security and obviously don't speak English well. The kicker is when the TSA person doesn't speak proper English themselves and are obviously not very well educated.

I've read somewhere that, if border controls were abolished, about a billion people from all across the world would move to the US. I'm guessing that, since people already want to come to US pretty badly, being welcoming is not a high priority for border personnel.

I guess they do that to not get a "connection" with the person in question. On the opposite, a technique to win someone over fast is to be nice and open about yourself from the beginning although you don't know him at all. If you like someone you might let slip something through (without even realizing it). I base this opinion on my experience with grading students. Some people can get really good at it. I do it aswell so I know what to look for and try to avoid being "too nice".

I think he was asked to write a function that will return true if the tree is balanced, not to actually balances it, which in my opinion is an exponentially easier question.

ever travelled to Israel? their immigration interviews are legendary.

Haha! Shit! The only time I've used atob in 20 years of doing JS was to read the ProtectionHeader of a SmoothStreaming manifest file recently. I'll bet little to none JS programmers know specifically what it does or if it even exists.

I didn't tell the journalists the question because it wouldn't mean anything to their target audience.

Most of these reposts (including this one in hacker news) have not reached out to me for additional or audience-specific details :)

I was the person in the story and I'm pretty sure this person could! https://twitter.com/cyberomin/status/835888786462625792

Passing through customs, there's rarely anyone else around to corroborate if you're taken aside.

Sarcasm doesn't do well on HN. You must hint the crowds by including a smiley. Though it ruins the joke, of course.