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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

It's actually fairly typical. When you enter on a H1B visa they ask you questions to see if your occupation (the one you got the visa for) is not made up.

I work in Finance, and when I was on a H1B visa (back in 2010), the immigration officer asked me some bond-related questions, just to see if I had any clue.

They also asked my wife what I was working on.

It's pretty annoying to feel that you're not being trusted, but yes, they don't trust you.

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

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> 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... ;)

The last convict ship to Australia sailed 10 years before the US Civil War, and even then it'd been tailing off for decades. White Americans are closer to being slavers than white Australians are to being convicts.

Besides, if you want to see who is more criminal-ey in the modern era, the US wins there with a 5x rate of incarceration...

And a 4x murder rate

Wait what? The Aborigine genocide has to figure in there somewhere. Add that in, what does the comparison look like?

MarkMc is talking about the modern era, but if you want to talk about the past - are you that ignorant that you're going to ignore what happened to the American Indians?

Um, the last Aborigine scalp was turn in for a bounty in the 1960's or so?

Got a source for that?

Given that Aborigines were slowly getting the vote between the 1920s and the last vestige in 1967, the idea that voting citizens were being scalped for money is supremely bizarre.

I definitely want to see a source for that. While I'm not heavily into fighting for native rights myself, I hang around a few people that are, and I think that this little nugget of information would have made its way into discussion amongst all the other horrible things that have happened to Aborigines over the years.

TIL, thanks.

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.

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

it's nothing like interview questions, just "hey so what did the 30y bond was headed last week?". Or "So should I buy stocks?".

Probably just to check whether I would start crying and confess I didn't know a thing about finance.

They also asked my wife if she knew all my first names (I have 4!).

But yeah they definitely asked some occupation-related questions.

Likewise. This thread is the first time I've even heard of it and I've traveled on my H1B fairly often. None of my friends have ever had this happen either.

When I enter the US, it's always hand over passport, put fingers on scanner, accept passport and walk on.

> 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...

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

We are being racist here and are assuming that being australian means being predominantly caucasian white.

His name is David Thornton (mentioned in the article, if you bothered to read it before commenting). Not 100% conclusive, but pretty strong evidence of being white, as Thornton is an English/Scottish name.

FWIW, as a nonwhite person myself, I think that accusing someone of racism for assuming David Thornton from Australia is white is beyond idiocy.

>We are being racist here

No we aren't. Racism is when you discriminate against a person due to their skin color. We're not discriminating against anyone.

eh. racism is an umbrella term for being prejudicial and discriminatory based on a persons race. while definitely being prejudicial it certainly wasn't discriminating.

also - article has a big photo of this guy's gormless white mug ;)

also - he's from Sydney, so probably a wanker as well.

Or we clicked on the link and verified that yes, an Australian man named David Thornton does indeed look white in the provided photograph.

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.

The guy was entering on a ESTA for tourism.

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?

> 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?

I doubt the question would be framed like that. They probably hired real engineers to write the questions and then tested if those work properly on other real engineers.

Why would the airport managers [edit: I mean immigration officers] be able to find engineers who can devise good tests? Why would they be able to find the right people to verify the tests on?

IMO companies have a hard time finding talented software developers. I'd expect the airport managers [edit: immigration officers] to find not-very-competent people who come up with the very wrong tests.

Internet connectivity means they only need one person on duty at the central office. If this weren't immigration law enforcement, they could even outsource it. :-)

I suppose they could hand out iPads while we're on line and have us complete HackerRank exams. So if someone is a plumber, would they provide a set of pipes to connect? What about a heart surgeon? That might get messy...

That's a good point. They could have an office with people on duty that remote-interviews everyone about all different kinds of jobs. Not saying it'd work well (no idea if it would), but I do think it'd work (a lot?) better than the scenario I first imagined.

One of the recent stories indicated border agents were literally comparing answers against a Wikipedia article; if you didn't have the answer in the Wikipedia article, you were wrong.

This would be in line with, for example, how Google does early-stage screening -- non-technical people are given a sheet of questions, and if you give an answer that's not verbatim what's on the sheet you're "wrong" and "not qualified" (see http://www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html).

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