This opportunity was brought to my attention by a recruiter. I was given a phone screen by the recruiter who forwarded the answers to the the company's HR. This phone screen was general, and lasted about 30 minutes. A couple of week later, someone from Unicon's HR department scheduled a phone appointment to conduct a short phone screen and arrange for me to fill out Unicon's job application. In another two weeks or so, the same HR person arranged for a phone interview by a "senior developer" on Unicon's staff. This was a technical interview and lasted close to 90 minutes. I was asked to describe details about some of the software I had developed. I was also asked about what types of source code control I have used, what unit test frameworks I used, etc. I was able to ask questions about Unicon's development structure, types of software developed, and even got some insights into their architectural plans and reasons. Unicon.net builds web suites for universities and colleges. Their basic approach is to take an open source frameworks (uPortal and Sakai), and extend and customize it for specific customers (when they are paid to do so). I would say that they are looking for developers who have proven open-source contributions, and are experts in the technologies that Sakia and uPortal are based on. All of the folks I dealt with were friendly and polite. All phone interviews started on-time.

HR contacted me through linkedin & wanted me to call so I did. I was asked how much I wanted to earn and why I wanted to leave where I'm at, etc, then was asked 10 initial 'yes/no' screening questions: 1) Do you know what Garbage Collection is in Java? 2) Do you know the difference between the Java List and Map data structures? 3) Can you code XML by hand without the assistance of an editor? 4) Have you written a Java unit test using a unit test framework (e.g., JUnit, TestNG)? 5) Can you write Java code using the two different "for" loop syntaxes? 6) Have you used Maven to compile your own Java code? 7) Have you written Java code that runs on a web server? 8) Have you ever used a Java stacktrace to find or fix a problem? 9) Have you ever written a Java class that implemented an interface? 10) Can you write and debug Java code without the help of an IDE? A technical phone interview was scheduled, and I submitted an employment app and resume. It was scheduled for an hour and went about 50 minutes. There was an exchange of a little about each other, then the interviewer scanned my resume and geared his questions off of it. Some of the questions were: What is JSP & JSTL? What's the advantage of using SVN over CVS? Why does a directories' size double under SVN? What is Garbage Collection? Some question about customizing the GC with JVM args? Why should I choose Set or List for my data structure? What is REST? What is Dependency Injection? What is Inversion of Control? What is ThreadLocal? What is a Transaction? How would you improve Java? Are you a contributor to any open source project? The next day I was mailed the rejection: "After careful consideration, we have concluded that there is not a match between your skill set and our particular requirements for the Java Developer position."