I had two rounds of phone interviews.

The first round, the interviewer was well-prepared, although the screening questions she asked were a bit odd.

The second round, the interviewer seemed rushed and was ill-prepared. There was no introduction (I didn't even know what he did at the company until I asked him at the end of the interview; yes, I had to ask him) and he didn't seem interested at all in my background. He asked a few SQL questions and a multithreaded question. The problem was he didn't understand much about multithreading. I gave a simple answer using synchronization and a counter, but he was surprisingly confused. Digging deeper, it became clear that he had some canned question/answer and was looking for a solution that used wait() and notify() instead of sleep(), even though his solution wouldn't work.

One of the really strange issues was describing coding questions over the phone rather than using something like collabedit. I finished the interviews quickly and did very well, but they got back to me saying that while they were impressed, they were "moving forward with a select few candidates whose backgrounds are more closely aligned with our current needs".

Overall, I can't help but wonder if I was simply used as interview training for their employees. The entire process took 3 days though, so I have to at least commend them for being so quick about it.

The interview questions themselves were rather odd. One was "what are the different scopes in Spring?" Testing my ability to spout little-known facts isn't helpful to the process. A much better question would have been "what is Spring and why is it useful?" A solid engineer would be able to answer the second question, while anyone that can answer the first is simply good at memorizing things.