The session was grueling: a relentless 2-hour interrogation with what felt like 1000 questions, including live coding, after a full 8-hour workday. The "staff engineer" demonstrated a lack of fundamental knowledge. When asked about the default implementation of hashCode, I correctly answered that it returns a unique integer derived from the object's memory address. He disagreed and claimed, absurdly, that "the default implementation returns 1." At that moment, I knew this was a waste of time. The rest of the interview wasn't any better. They focused on outdated and disliked concepts like "checked exceptions" in Java, which are largely rejected by the Java community and ignored by other JVM languages. Good luck to anyone who ends up dealing with it.