A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn. After speaking to her twice, she set up a phone interview.
A senior engineer called for a 30 minutes phone interview. He asked some advanced Java questions and asked me to architect a solution for an elevator system. (defining classes, interfaces, methods, etc).
The recruiter calls me right after and tells me I did very well. So invites me for an in person interview. During the in person interview, the recruiter received and greeted me. Very nice girl, I forgot her first name, but her last name was Costello.
She first show me around their building. The front looks very nice and colorful. The area where the developers work looked like a total dungeon. No windows, no cubicles or pods. Pretty much the developers sat next to each other along a brick wall. I kind of felt like walking out at this point.
First two young developers came to the interview room. They asked very simple Java questions for the most part. Like name the eight primitive data types in java. Name the differences between an abstract class and an interface, etc.
Next, two senior developers came to the interview room. Very nice guys, both of them, but they totally butchered me. Not a single Java or core program question. All their questions were about web development. I've never done web development. They asked me about CSS selectors and to write examples on how to use them. They also asked about inheritance in javascript.
I knew I wasn't going to get an offer because I knew I did really bad in the web development questions, but I could give some advice, please set these as requirements in the job description for a core java developer. Even I had gotten an offer it had to had been really good for me to take it as the last thing I would want to do is work facing the wall all day in between two people without any natural light coming in.