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Java has one of the deepest talent pools in backend, but it is also the most stratified. Ten years of Java can mean a modern Spring Boot service with records and virtual threads, or a legacy application server monolith the person mostly configured rather than wrote. The real risk is mistaking tenure for depth, since the ecosystem rewards people who can operate heavy frameworks without ever understanding what the JVM is doing underneath. Pin down which era and which stack the experience is actually in before you get excited about the years on the resume.
Look for someone who can explain what an annotation like @Transactional actually does, not just where to put it, because Spring hides a lot and the weak candidates lean on that magic. Strong hires have a real feel for the JVM: garbage collection pauses, heap sizing, thread safety, and where memory goes. Ask for a production story about a memory leak, a GC stall, or a concurrency bug they chased down, and listen for how they used heap dumps, profilers, or thread dumps to find it. Vague answers about "optimizing performance" are a tell worth probing.
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