19 karma · joined April 18, 2017
It's a very tellin question if they claim Java experience and can't say anything coherent about leaks or "unintentionally reachable" objects.
It means both that they haven't had to attack memory pressure issues, haven't used heap dump tools, etc., and haven't had the intellectual curiosity to know how the platform works.
It's all about objects being "unintentionally reachable" which generally all boils down to putting something in a collection and never taking it out, or completely forgetting about object lifecycle. Just because you have a runtime and a GC doesn't mean you can forget any kind of teardown. (If you register an event listner and never unregister you are ignoring lifecycle.)
People who have a few years of Java on their resume should have some idea of when an object is eligible for collection by the GC and the common programmer errors shown by other posts in this thread that can cause leaks.