I had a phone interview with three people, some managers, some technical.

Questions were about previous experience, databases (Oracle), Java, and some scripting.

This was followed by a 1:1.

The questions were trick questions, with no interest in my experience or topics advertised in the job specification.

He jumped right on Spring frameworks questions (Spring was never mentioned before) and specifically to the use of annotations in version 2.

I just had a strange sensation he was pre-programmed, as he didn't have any reaction when I talked about XML-based config and the latency of the reflection package (like he almost was not aware of it).

Strange.

Describe the benefits of using annotations vs XML configuration mapping in Spring.