I recently interviewed for a Java Developer position, and unfortunately, the process felt very outdated and overly academic. Instead of assessing my real-world coding skills or experience building applications, most of the questions were straight from a textbook or CS101 lecture.
The interview focused heavily on theoretical topics like garbage collection, SOLID principles, the ACID model, CAP theorem, and HTTP protocol versions — without any context or practical application. There were no discussions about my actual projects, frameworks like Spring Boot, or how I write, test, or deploy code. Even when concurrency was brought up, it was about the lifecycle of a thread and differences between lightweight and regular threads — not how you'd manage async tasks in real production code.
Some LeetCode-style puzzles were also thrown in, which felt disconnected from day-to-day backend development work. There was no live coding in an IDE, no discussion of build tools, testing strategies, or architecture.
Overall, the process seemed designed to quiz you like a student rather than evaluate you like a working engineer. For a modern Java role, I expected a focus on system design, code quality, problem-solving, and collaborative engineering practices — none of which were really covered.
If you're looking for a role where practical skills matter, this interview might not give you a chance to show them.