It is different, but no much, in Bay Area.
Our team has been interviewing Senior Software Engineers in the last 6 months. We did hire 3, but in general, I have to say it is hard to find a good candidate. BTW, we primarily use Java, not J2EE, though.
One of my observations, which is consistent with my previous expereinces, is that many candidates might be able to get jobs done if given the frameworks they have been using. Without those frameworks, however, many of them couldn't write good code. I met some in real work experiences. To be worse, many don't know how the frameworks work under the hood. That could always be potential problems in high load high concurrency systems.
About this comment: "比如有人問在Object class裏clone()method為啥要access modifier要定義成protected的等等，我做了10多年的項目也沒遇到到過這種情況。。。" This question is indeed unusual, and a little tricky. No disrepect, though, a java programmer with many years of experience should come out with an educated guess. One could even say Cloneable is a bad design, if he can gives reasons to support it.
