Financial companies reputation

"In this financial company you will be under stress and work 50 - 60 hours a week"
said the recruiter ( placement firm).

But in fact everybody seems charming, they spend some time for technology studies, their are open to new ideas and they do 35 hours !

It seems certain financial companies are way much cool than other non financial companies !

The SimpleDateFormat incident

I think that a java developer with more than 2 years experience must be able to answer to the question "How do you parse a date".

For me someone whose answer to this question does not contain the word simpleDateFormat did never really work ( or maybe has really a very bad memory ! ).

But each time I say it, there is at least one (2 years or much more) developer that appears to have no idea about what I'm saying.

Is everybody playing with frameworks instead of coding ?

Show me your harddisk, I will tell you who you are

How can some experienced developers be unable to organize their folders on their workStation ?

Like not having a Download folder and downloading everything on the desktop, or being unable to find where is the previous version of the product under development (= not having a place to put ear and war files).

This one question I would ask if I ever conduct a job interview : where do you download your opensource libraries and tools, how do you organize it ?