The surprising part: During the Technical Screening round, I was asked questions like: How do you deploy a Spring Boot application in production? What is Spring Boot Actuator, and how do you do health checks? What is the N+1 problem in Hibernate? How can you speed up a Spring Boot app in production? These are good technical questions, but it was unexpected coming from an HR professional. During an HR screening round. At the end, I was told they are looking for experienced candidates, even though it was clearly a fresher role.