learning java

[rus20376 at infolaunch.com (Adam Russell)]

>Message: 9
>Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:49:58 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Duane Morin <dmorin at lear.morinfamily.com>
>To: "D.E. Chadbourne" <235u at comcast.net>
>Cc: BLU <discuss at blu.org>
>Subject: Re: learning java

>Maybe if you 
>want to target some big financial enterprises or something, sure, but 
>we're just a small company that wants people that can code (and we're 
>gonna ask you the same technical questions whether you claim to be 
>certified or not :)).

Just curious, what sort of technical questions do you ask candidates for java positions? 
I have never seen any sort of consistancy in this part of the interview process. For example, I recall a particularily grueling "sit in front of this computer and write this code according to this spec and let me know when you are done" part of an interview that was just plan awful. They did hire me and when I had to administer the very same test to others I felt incredibly guilty. Other times the "technical" part of the interview was just a loose discussion of how I implemented things in the past, different projects, etc. 
Maybe with candidates that are expected to just know java(or any other high level language) it may be slightly more difficult to test much beyon d understanding the language syntax and major APIs in that you may not expect them to know much about lower level data structures. By this I mean in interviews for a position in which the projects were C based I was asked about implementing linked lists and such, presumably to ensure that I understood basic data structures, but someone who just knows java may not know much about the actual implementation of the HashMaps or LinkedList class he is using.