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      SelfEmployed.com
      3.9★Compensation and benefits

      Senior Java Developer Interview

      13 June 2015
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at NSF in May 2015

      Interview

      I first had a half-hour phone interview with a recruiter. Then I had a one-hour technical interview with two programmers and one member of the training staff over the phone. The interview questions with the programmers were overwhelmingly technically oriented. For the technologies I said I used, I was asked a lot of Java trivia questions about them. For example, what is the difference between an interface and an abstract class. For Oracle, I was asked about inner joins and foreign keys. For JSF, what does the immediate="true" property do. I did have a few questions about work in general, like what was a recent accomplishment I was proud of. The trainer kept asking me how I would ensure that data with limited visibility was not inadvertently made visible after I made changes. For some reason, I couldn't figure out what she was specifically asking me about. The answer to that was to test the application with user IDs that mapped to different roles. She also asked how I gathered requirements in the past, how I documented them and how I got approval for the changes. I've done a lot of that type of work in the past, and I thought these questions were common-sense type stuff, and I answered them as best as I could. Their current favorite technology stack is JSF and JPA. They do have some apps that use Spring and Hibernate, but they are not creating applications in those technologies anymore. One of the programmers said they evaluate the latest Java technologies every six months or so to see if they should stay the course or switch to what's hot. I didn't get a good feeling from the interview. It seemed like all the programmers cared about was whether I knew a lot of trivia about Java and Java-related technologies, but not what sort of co-worker I would be. I've worked with Java/J2EE for seven years, and sometimes you can't remember everything you've done. They really want a programmer with good Oracle experience, both in creating queries and database design. Just knowing how to access Oracle via JDBC isn't enough. I never received any feedback from the recruiter, even after asking via e-mail. Personally, this doesn't seem like an enjoyable place to work. If I had gotten an offer, I would likely have passed on it. After the interview, I understood why the job seems to always be posted every six months or so. They want the perfect candidate and likely go with contractors as a stop-gap before they decide to try the interview process again. If you really want to work here, I recommend searching the interview for sample technical interview questions for all of the technologies you know, so that information will be quicker to retrieve during the interview.

      Interview questions [5]

      Question 1

      What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface?
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      What does the JSF immediate=true property accomplish?
      1 Answer

      Question 3

      Explain lazy loading
      Answer question

      Question 4

      Explain the difference between a List and a Set
      Answer question

      Question 5

      What is the difference between a checked and an unchecked exception?
      Answer question
      3