oddly, when i was an actual developer i seemed to get more of these, "let's just talk" interviews.<p>when i started doing dev-adjacent roles like support or TAM or sales engineer, that's when i started getting stupid fucking programming challenges and related bullshit.<p>from my side, i like the q and a format because i can pretty quickly tell how fucking stupid someone is -- within 5 minutes. and i don't need people around me to be geniuses, but working with C people or pikers -- just never been my thing.<p>i'm not 'against' those types of people - i've def been beaten down into those types of people (work styles?) at positions - but in terms of wanting to live some type of a challenging-in-a-good-way work lifestyle, it's just not for me.<p>most of the coding stuff i did was pretty....easy-ish java standard fare stuff -- so nothing really deep in algo or just anything you would have to be actually really good at -- the toughest parts of say any new job would be...could you pretty quickly ramp up into some Java codebase with a few thousand classes, abstracton on top of ridiculous factory abstraction, and start getting things done.<p>so, if you actually knew the language, knew all the standard idioms/design patterns, knew all the basics of common dev touchpoints like db transaction/error handling/scaling/etc., you'd be fine.<p>in my case, if you said you knew J2EE, then you'd have to be able to talk about all the basics of the common J2EE tech (jdbc/ejb/servelets/jsp/etc.), servlet/ejb lifeycycles, maybe some stuff about multithreading/static variables/scope/etc.-type stuff -- not necessarily writing anything threaded yourself but i mean if you knew the basics of how you could do that syntax-wise then great.<p>i'd always get some performance-related stuff -- often as a starter question to find out if they had messed up by inviting you to even get to this stage - so, like, for Java-world that might be 'What is the diff between a hashtable and hashmap, and why use one v the otehr?' or "What's up with String and Stringbuffer?"<p>don't know if this is what interviewers were thinking, but i think part of it was diving at the "Is this person actually gd curious and interested in quality - achieving it or at least striving for it?"<p>for the higher-level positions -- dev lead/architect -- how do you decide on tradeoffs -- under/over-engineering-type questions. i.e. how much tech debt is acceptable?<p>outside of that, maybe attitude -- if you think you might want it, i'd be curious and ask about what challenges they're facing. "Are there any performance issues you're facing right now, or just design challenges, that you have some ideas about but you don't know which way you're going to go yet?" Or maybe you went one way and now are having second thoughts? Like maybe you went cross-platform and now you're like "****!" :-D<p>start out with a 'Hallo' :-D