Technical phone screens be like, "we see you have years of OOP experience, but can you tell us about the differences between an interface and an abstract class?"

Yes. Yes I can. Can you tell me why you're asking such basic questions? Is this something people actually don't know this late in the game?

The problem is screeners/interviews who interview from a script rather than tailor the meeting to the person being interviewed. These sorts of things are often mind numbingly miserable but often times you have to tolerate it to get to someone who actually knows what's going on.

I mean, it makes sense. You don't want to schedule half a dozen people to make time for in person interviewing, only to find out the candidate is a squib. But is that actually a common problem? I've never been on the other side of the fence of hiring.

Also, it was the lead dev doing the tech screen, not the recruitment firm :o

@Christine it happens a LOT. I normally start by explaining that the questions are mostly trivial, and decide if the candidate is worth scheduling for an interview.

I'm in a smaller market, but you'd be surprised how many "senior software engineers with 20 years experience" can't answer that question, or some other basic questions like "what's the difference between passing by reference vs by value"...

The phone screen (where I am) is literally just to screen out the ones who don't know their ass from their elbow so we don't waste time on them with an in person interview. The phone screens normally take 15 minutes, and we normally know within 5 minutes if they're any good.

One of my favorites was a candidate with 18 years experience who didn't know how to write a loop, and said she keeps template files that she copies and pastes from.

They should instead ask
"what's a trait and how does it differ from interfaces and abstract classes?"

@h3ll not just scala, a few other languages use a similar system

Functional programmer here! smh