java interview with Investment bank -2

This was interview with Tier 1 investment bank in Singapore with position of Senior software engineer. They were looking for java candidate for trading application. The interview started in totally different way. They took first round as telephonic interview with general screening question mainly focusing on soft skills. The second round was really tuff, they asked for written test and grilling after the written test. They were just behind me on understanding hashcode, equals, java runtime binding etc.

1'st Round ) It was Managerial round to screen candidate (telephonic - 20 minutes)

Soft skills:

1. Why do you want to join Bank?
2. Why do you want to leave your current organisation.
3. What will you bring to the company
4. what are your strengths and weakness

Technical question:

1. Define any architecture that you have built.
2. What sort of developments have you worked on? What was your contribution?
3. Which was your biggest career achievement that made your proud in the organisation (In terms of major projects worked on, process improvement plans etc) ?

2) Round interview

It was written paper and latter feedback on answers.

1)Write the equals() and hascode() methods for this class
class Employee
{
   String name;
   String phone;
   Date birth;

  public boolean equals(Object other)
  {

  }

  public int hashCode ()
  {

  }
}

2) Write a method to remove "." from a given String. Ex: "ab.cd.e" -> "abcde"
   public String removeDots(String s) { }
   with
a) an iterative method
b) a recursive method

3) Write the JUnit for the method removeDots(String s)

4) Question on equals(Object o) and equals(Test t) in a class Test

5) Question on the way Java handle parameters in a method (by Value or by Reference)

6) This is very nice question on dynamic binding. What is the output of this program

class Parent
{
   static {
   System.out.println("Parent sStatic");
}

{
   System.out.println("Parent Init");
}

Parent()
  {
   System.out.println("Parent Const");
  }
}

class Child extends Parent
{
  static {
   System.out.println("Child sStatic");
  }

{
   System.out.println("Child Init");
}

  Child()
  {
     System.out.println("Child Const");
  }

  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
       new Child();
  }

}

 They gave me around 1 hour to write these answers then I had face to face interview with first asking questions on my answers on above questions. Latter they moved to areas which are not covered in this test like database, messaging, transaction etc.. the questions asked -

1) What is indexing in database and how it worked?
2) What is clustered index and what is algorithm used to store that?
3) Explain why hashcode and equals are important and what is contract between them?
4) Why 31 is used as number in implementation of hashcode?
5) What is static syncronization?
6) what is reentrant lock in java?
7) what is volatile varibale is java and how they are different than atomic variables in java 1.5?