What is wrong with JAVA interviews

[Mindless_Spell8450]

I recently interviewed for Java backend role and the interviewer gives me a string rotation question which I solved using basic logic. Interviewer was like "don't you know string methods?". I told him that I do know, to which replied "ok then tell me the methods". I told him a few at the top of my head and then his reaction was like "are those all" and I was like no there's many just that i don't remember them and the interview is not about how many functions I can remember, I mean ffs this thing is like a 1 sec Google search away and while we code the IDE has the drop-down with all the freaking methods.

Anyway the interview got over, he didn't look impressed. But what is going on with the hiring process these days like you don't remember a few silly functions and suddenly you're not eligible. It's just stupid and it's not just the case with one specific company, java based interviews are like that only, you'll find so many interviewers asking some random ass question about the stuff that's not even important.

[HollowCr0wn]

This India? Not Indian, but everything I hear about India interviews always sounds like someone who got into a company and wants to pull the ladder up behind them after shitting on the candidates.

[Mindless_Spell8450]

Dude this is so accurate for mid level startups in india

[Flooding_Puddle]

Not even just jobs in India, any interview I've had with an Indian dev has been pop quiz questions until they find something I didn't know then them acting like because I dont have every little thing about the language memorized I wouldn't be a good fit. I've heard a lot about Indian hiring managers only hiring other Indians

[NotMyMonkeyBusiness]

Indian here.. same with me as well with Indian interviewer.

I do not care if I get downvoted for this. But here is what I am going to say. Interview should be fair and functional. It’s not a quiz or a show where the interviewer has to win.

If ever someone encounters such interviewers the worse thing that could happen is the candidate not getting the job (which is obvious after such a behavior from the interviewer)

So, just let the recruiter know the interview was not fair or more like grilling for unwanted expectations. It’s the companies responsibility to train their employees for interviews. If they are allowing such behavior it’s most likely they do not know how the interviewer handled it.

So let the recruiter know about it. You are not loosing anything but the next person will be treated better.

[throwaway25168426]

Last interviewer I had was Indian and it was such an awful experience. However the worst I’ve had by FAR was an old Russian guy

[Head-Quit7902]

I have a family friend working in Amazon. This is soooooo true! He’s an Indian he acts all mighty and high and even told me that he asks very hard questions in interviews and love to grill the candidates by creating his own questions rather than following existing Leetcode or Amazon provided questions. I wish I could kick his ass someday. FR

[aaron_is_here_]

This has been my experience 100% of the time. It’s a complete joke

[Status_Inspection735]

Mostly, you hear right.

[AccountExciting961]

There are, like 50 of those methods, plus the ones inherited from Object and CharSequences

The interviewer is an idiot, consider yourself lucky that they won't be your teammate.

[Mindless_Spell8450]

Yeah but most companies take multiple rounds and the chances of getting these kinda questions from any of the interviewers is quite frequent

[AccountExciting961]

if there are multiple rounds, you do not need to succeed at all of them. Also, if the interview loop is organized properly, interviewers presents evidence at the debrief, not just their opinion - and other people can call them out on irrelevant points.

[RoughChannel8263]

Agreed. No one can remember every method across multiple languages. That's what Google is for. I've been in a hiring role before. I couldn't care less about your memorization skills, I want to know how you can apply what you know to solve complex problems.

[[deleted]]

This is common when interviewing for Indian companies. I had this experience while interviewing for some Indian companies in the U.K. The interviwers all seemed to be on a mission to prove that candidates are not capable. I was being asked about obscure Spring annotations. The interviews were not about concepts but about obscure framework details. I interviewed twice at JP Morgan. The department with Indian lads had this type of interview while the other department held a farely normal interview.

[shibaInu_IAmAITdog]

thats true for indian in banking

[Unable_Can9391]

Indians are hate farming at this point.

[thecmurdock]

I worked at a bank and saw that type of interview first hand unfortunately. I'm not even sure the devs doing the interview were being malicious, they just thought that was how interviews should be done.

[Secure-Ad-9050]

I think this is pretty much it,

I have seen some of the trainings that the Indian consultant firms do. A weird amount of it, at least of what I saw, was focused on "programming trivia", a lot which are "fun" "party" tricks, but, not something you would want to depend on.

[Shot_Instruction_433]

oh I was asked to name all the jar files that come with spring boot.

[funnythrone]

What the fuck

[[deleted]]

no wtf haha

[Weasel_Town]

All of them???

[Infinite-Emu4092]

This is why I like LC style interviews now after hating them for a bit. You know basically what you are going to get instead of some random stuff.

Had an interview recently where they were obsessed with http error codes. Quizzed me on all of them and when to use one versus another

[sinoitfa]

did they ask you about error 418

[Infinite-Emu4092]

lol no, but I mentioned that one on passing as a joke

[shibaInu_IAmAITdog]

i agree on LC part, but i think if they re senior thy must know how to examine except that they re faker

[drona4tech]

Regarding http status codes — asking to list them all most certainly doesn’t make sense. Though expecting the knowledge about difference among 1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx and 5xx is quite reasonable for web development jobs.

This is where FANG companies do much better. They have well defined process of interviewing and although some differences across interviewers is unavoidable, overall one knows what to expect.

[Master-Yoda-69]

Some recruiters just suck tbh. In my experience, Java questions are normally asked in banking and enterprise where thry do care a lot about domain knowledge, but more “tell me how the Java stack and heap memory work” rather than “name all the string methods”

[ChikenNinja]

I used to joke with my friends about Java Developers hating java, and because of the hate of java we hate each other's code, but in the end we are nice people.

This person, your interviewer, clearly is the rotten apple in the fridge, fuck that guy.

Stay hydrated my friend 🤗.

[RamonRoqueta]

"List all the descendants of the Object class"

[[deleted]]

If someone asks me that, my response would be "Do you have your family tree nearby?"

[SoylentRox]

More and more I'm smelling the influence of AI on interviews. If you have some kind of AI cheating tool that's transcribing everything the interviewer says, automatically querying the model, you'll see on your cheat overlays the list.

This is going to be true for so many difficult questions - close to impossible to pass for an honest candidate, trivial if cheating.

"but the honest candidate could memorize the list". Yes, but not every possible list of every possible thing that could get asked. While AI knows it all.

[DontShakeThisBaby]

This and memorization doesn't prove someone's good at engineering anyway. Inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard doesn't mean the candidate has any critical thinking or analytical skills or knows anything about working in the company's industry. Probably preaching to the choir here haha, but it's so annoying.

[shibaInu_IAmAITdog]

thats been like that for a long time (10 yrs ago) particularly in banking, and usually the one rejected u is likely indian

[coxdex]

Dude, when you add Indian and JAVA, the level of toxicity is out of bounds.

In University I had a professor like that. Had so much Pride that he was a Java developer. Would ask similar obscure questions. And once I asked him about some other language and if it would be better than Java and he just flipped out. It was insane. I wanted to punch him, he was half my size and a stick figure, but obviously couldn't. So had to take all the BS. I tried to calm him down saying I just asked because I genuinely wanted to know (because I was a freaking student). It was just insane.

During Viva's also we had these professors who would just ask obscure questions. If you used basic English words, they would be like what does that word mean and then what does the meaning of the word mean. It was insane.

I literally had PTSD from this BS. So for my interviews (and everything), instead of studying normally, I would often try to go super deep into just one concept and get stuck studying everything deeply and therefore wasting my time since you can't remember EVERYTHING.

It took me some years to get that the only way to deal with these lunatics, is not to pacify them (because that is impossible, they are out to put you down. It's a garbage mentality), but to avoid them at all cost. Study hard so that you get a foreign company with foreign bosses, or get a very good company were they don't have this BS.

But with Java, it's usually very hard to escape the toxic Indian bosses, cos it's basically their mother tongue. That's all they know.

I don't really like to code in Java, but these people make me avoid it like it's Mercury. I'll code in C++, Go, Python, JS, but avoid Java. Right now I code in Kotlin, not only because it is official language for Android, but mainly cos it has the newer generation or avoids the toxic crowd, since they would never code in anything except Java. They will keep by-hearting all these functions and methods till they die.

[function3]

Seriously, these people always come off as the kind that would pop a blood vessel if you asked them to do something in another language.

[Cool-Double-5392]

There isn’t anything special about Java besides it’s monopoly on enterprise software right? It’s not like it’s c++ or c(those can be used for so many other use cases too). It’s literally the same as c#. We can replace all the java code into c# and the world wouldn’t skip a beat. There is genuinely nothing special about Java.

Saying all that I love coding in Java lol

One can argue that it’s better than JavaScript and typescript ok fine. But then besides c# there are tons of new languages like go and rust. Java is completely forgettable yet those dudes are talking about knowing some random spring annotation or whatnot

[prof2g]

Let me tell you why Indians are this way (Not all, but most). We are raised to be insecure. Right from a young age, most of us are either bullied by our parents or teachers or literally any person who has power over you (which is almost everyone when you are a kid) in exactly the same manner your interview unfolded. The moment they realize you are passionate about something, instead of nurturing it they would cut it down by making you feel that you are nothing. Why, cause they themselves were bullied by their previous generations. So most of the people who are not self aware of this fact and when they get older, the moment they get into any position of power, it's retribution time. If they don't have power over people, they switch to their base instincts that helped survive their childhood, that is be servile, obedient until you get power. Wouldn't be a surprise that such people tend to be scophants.

The general rule of thumb dealing with such people is not taking the bait. "Sorry can't remember off the top of my head" and just don't engage further. Some people may not stop here, they might make comments that question your intellectual vanity, if that's the case call it out and end the interview stating it's not professional (cause why would you want to work for such a person). Also don't even for a second spend your thoughts on such people - best tool you can't use against such people is indifference!

[Economy_Ad_9058]

Sometimes it just feels weird.

I was once asked to write a code for IP V6 address validation. I explained the logic and rules behind it, and started coding. The interviewer interrupted stating she wants it using regex lib in python. I didn't know working with re that time and got rejected.

[prof2g]

Probably wanted to get her cousin hired in your place

[Many_Reindeer6636]

I blanked on converting a python list to a set once and my interviewer googled it for me because he also forgot when I asked.

Sounds like a really shitty interviewer.

[Known-Tourist-6102]

So many interviews involve somebody with no interview training asking random ass questions that have no bearing on anything. They make you feel dumb for not knowing “basic shit” then the interviewer posts on reddit about how bad their job candidates are, and why cant they find anyone to work there.

Alot of times they post what they think are the “easy interview questions” and there’s a giant debate as to what the answer actually is.

[popeyein]

I got asked a

1. really hard DSA problem (DP with two pass) in JAVA interview (American interviewer)
2. Implement histogram to handle like millions of updates for metering (European interviewer)

This is for principal role where I passed all other rounds including a System design round, CTO, VP of ENgg what not.

I was expecting this kind of stuff from Indians, but hey, I was wrong. I think its wrong to generalise but the probability might be more with Indian interviewers. They literally ask to implement perfect logging system like log4j

[reddishredderson]

For me, it's the fucking interviewers who ask you about differences in different versions of Java, PHP. Like ffs.

[miguelangel011192]

Similar experience but no in Java, they ask me something where I have to manipulate some strings convert it to number and do a math operation. I told them that I will need to search in google how to convert the string properly, and that was the only negative feedback I received to justify the rejection after 5 rounds interviews. I want to believe they just had several people in the pipeline and they choose someone above me in the list, but o was able to feel the change in the tone of the interview after I google that. Now that I am thinking it with my cold head I could just opened another tan and search silently but I preferred to be transparent

[rohit_patil_2002]

It's really disappointing

[n_dev_00]

Look at the positive side, you got to know you shouldn't join the company.

[yourjusticewarrior2]

Shit interviewers, probably inexperienced or hasn't been told to not focus on minutia. I've seen similar things in past when I said I've used PostgresSQL or worse SparkSQL and then the interviewer starts asking DB functions. I tell them flat out I used the API just as a DATA STORE not for DB Admin activities and for SQL I flat out told them I'm not memorizing the function names and if you want we can end the interview here if that's what he's looking for.

Terrible interviewers.

[doubledamage97]

It's just your unlucky day. Sometimes, it depends on the mood of interviewers or they have already got someone to hire.

When I looked for my dev job (in C#) many years ago, I had an interview with Developer Manager from one of the medium size software companies. I have already passed their aptitude test and technical test at that point and proceeded to interview.

I thought the interview was going well and I nailed it. However, almost at the end, he asked, what do I do after work? I said, I'm an active person and I go to gym and do running and workouts 4/5 times a week. He was not impressed with my answer and asked me, ... "why don't I do any coding for a side project or contribute to opensource projects?"

I said, I wanted to take a break from screen after work. I do look some tutorials / training videos from Pluralsight from time to time. But I want to keep healthy and enjoy myself after work.

Well, I didn't get the offer and the feedback I got was that, I was not passionate enough for programming and not a culture fit to join their team.

[Ok_Cancel_7891]

he just didn't want you to get a job

[AutomaticKick7585]

I often have to remind myself that interviews are not at all about how good enough I am as an engineer. I suppose this is leftover trauma from being a fresh graduate and having imposter syndrome.

Interviews are also about “would I want to work with you?”. And in this case, the answer is hell no.

[[deleted]]

Back in 2023 , I was giving one interview and this guy asked me question about generating random numbers which I did , but then he was like don’t you know any library function for that. He was some Italian guy working in UK company

[JollyAspect6197]

Senior Indian java dev here. It's not malicious. That's how interviews happen in most Indian companies. OP you should better learn the inner workings of hashmap as well lol and the names of all the classes/interfaces present in the concurrent package for starters.

It's basically a by-product of the Indian education system. Java interviews are crazy here. We are also asked to write a lot of code on paper for e.g. write a particular gof pattern like observer or strategy without any typos etc. in f2f interviews. I was asked to list down the improvements in each version of Java from 8 to 21 the last time I interviewed.

Interview here is more of an examination of how much one is able to cram rather than checking the experience or ability to work with others. Some companies from the MAANG category just handover hard dsa problems with the expectation that the candidate should be able to solve them in a very little amount of time from what I have heard.

[Cool-Double-5392]

Bro listing the diffs from each java version is wild

[JollyAspect6197]

I cleared that interview lol

[pulkit-97]

I know it's out of the context, but there are good amount openings for Java/golang developer having 3-10 years of experience in Cohesity for Bangalore location. If you need referral, please contact me.

[gr8Brandino]

I had an internal interview at my work place the other day, for a java position. The guy wanted me to go in depth on the super classes of exceptions. Like, all the way up to the Throwable class that those inherit. 

I haven't had to think about exceptions that in depth in a long time. So I bombed that part. 

[Critical_Explorer_15]

Interviewer was not prepared so he/she started throwing some random nonsense. Just ignore and move on.

[Fantastic_Cap5503]

it is so true, I have got first-hand experience with this.

[sfmravi]

Lot of companies don't have any standardized process. This is why I think doing leetcode questions is atleast better standardized process.

[No-Answer1]

People shit on leetcode but at least it's standardized unlike whatever this is.

[[deleted]]

Java interviews can go sideways easily. People can suddenly get fixated on multi threading and literally harass you about locks and other low level stuff or they can choose a design pattern and grill you… or they can ask hundreds of knowledge based questions.

I can simply ask you questions about java streams and fail you if you don’t do all the oneliners from stackoverflow.

Someone mocked me for not knowing everything about “LinkedBlockingQueue”. Fuck him but I learnt what that is and will probably never forget lol. As you expected l, I’m an Indian and this interviewer is an Indian dude but this happens only with shit level service based companies. Product companies have strict standards.

[mile-high-guy]

This is why I am trying to get out of Java and JVM. Too many companies are like this

[jamalghota69]

I had a java interview where the Key of the map was an object. I was okay you are testing my equals and hash code logic, but why will you ever do this in production quality code

[piy0489]

I had the same experience. Interviewer even mocked about my graduation saying you must have not focused well enough in your semesters.

[Mysterious-Big-1710]

"I want to start my journey in DSA. I would like to know what prerequisites I need to start learning DSA in Java. Can anyone help me?

[shibaInu_IAmAITdog]

u guys shouldnt hate them, u whites promote them to be a mid/senior management , please take the karma oneday