Caroline Fairchild reports on a situation that never should have happened. This is just not my country.
…. After landing, Omin waited for 20 minutes and then reached the front of the line, where a Customs and Border Protection officer asked him a series of questions. It was here that Omin realized that the job might be challenging, but getting into America could now be impossible. No one at Andela had prepared him for the new reality.
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 a 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?”
Read more on CNBC.
I had SW Engineer as an official title once, yet didn’t have any formal training in software engineering, just took a few programming classes.
I’ve used b-trees a bunch over the years, but only through libraries.
It is also possible to be a software engineer and not know anything about OOD/OOP. However, I could answer the 2nd question. Whether that answer is what they are looking for is a different question entirely.
This is why my passport and tax forms list my occupation as “Consultant.” I only need be an expert in what I already know that way.