[liquidcool]

First, this didn't stop me from inviting the applicant to discuss her work/knowledge relevant to the job. She did not respond.

Second, it's totally possible I misunderstood something. I do run the largest JUG in SoCal, so I'm not a complete Java noob. But in truth the last few years have been Groovy, and I'm not close to being a FT coder. I don't claim to be a Java expert.

However :-) You are assuming these were static inner classes, and they weren't inner/nested at all. These were multiple top level classes in one file. I can see how maybe you'd do that for composition, and I did it once to get around a wrinkle in Grails, but this really seemed unnecessary. They weren't short classes. This person was a masters candidate and had little production experience, and the whole thing came off as rushed and sloppy. Frankly, seeing all those ~ files because there was no gitignore bothered me more.