“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?”

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.”