This was the worst interview I've ever been on. They either did not know what they were doing, or lied. I first had a Phone interview were I was asked general questions about my work history. I told them I had been doing front-end JavaScript and Angular development the last few years, but before that I had done Java, but it was over 3 years since I had done Java, but could pick it back up quickly. I then was asked to come in for a face to face interview that would be for a 80% Front-End JavaScript and 20% Backend Java Position. I was told the process would be an Interview with the Team, a Pared Programming exercise and then an interview with the Manager.
First I got there on time and had to wait over 1/2 hour for the Manager to come out and get me. I was lead to as conference room and was told I would be doing the Pared Programming exercise first. Then a software engineer came in caring his laptop. Asked what IDE I preferred to use. I said IntelliJ for JavaScript. He said this was a Java programming exercise. Since Eclipse was the last IDE I used Java in I selected it. The version he had was several versions newer than any Eclipse I had ever used, so I told him that. He said to create a In-Memory cache with Java. So I started creating the main for the program. After getting that done he said there was no need for a main we would just user unit testing to test the work. (BTW: He had no mouse, just a track-pad on the laptop and it was setup super sensitive and set to do touch clicking, as well as the whole track-pad being a button, so whenever I touched it to move the mouse, it would click and do things I did not intend. It was the WORST setup laptop I have EVER seen). So I started to create the cache. It had been long enough since I used Java, I did not remember all the different array elements it had and asked if a Vector would be appropriate. He was reluctant to help, but said Google is our friend. So I googled it and found all the different array containers like dictionaries etc in Java and asked which one would be best. He would not give me any suggestions again. I said something like "I thought this was a PARED programming exercise?". So he suggested using a dictionary, after starting to use a dictionary and looking at the docs I saw a hash-map extended a dictionary and had much more functionality. So I said the dictionary was a bad idea and I should use the hash-map. So I did so and got most of it finished, but it was not it's own class it was a program using a hash-map. Had he explained what he wanted to start with, I would have just create a class that extended a hash-map. The manager came in a few minutes later had said time was up and how was it going. I said not well at all, and Left!