Oracle Interview Experience for Technical Staff Member (On-campus)
Oracle visited our campus for the Member Technical Staff role in November. Due to Covid-19, hiring was entirely virtual.
CGPA cutoff was: 7.0
Below is the process and my experience:
Round 1(online test): The test was conducted on Oracle’s platform Taleo. The test was majorly divided into 4 sections:
- Aptitude: Conventional aptitude questions, I prepared from JavatPoint, and I believe the content is sufficient to crack any good company. Apart from aptitude, the test contained some data interpretation based questions and flowchart-based questions where we were required to substitute the correct statements at missing places
- Technical MCQ: Based on OS, DBMS(see Codd’s rule as well for this section), DSA, OOPs
- Coding based questions: Either to predict the output or figure out correct pieces of code. The section was loaded with AVL trees for me, make sure you take a look at AVL trees, Red-black trees, BSTs, Radix sort, and other sorting algorithms.
- English aptitude: Comprehension based questions, correct usage of words, etc
Around 350 students appeared for the test from which 64 were shortlisted.
My interview started at 12 pm.
Round 2(Technical interview 1):
- Tell me about yourself.
- He interrupted me and asked, how comfortable are you with Linux? Since I mentioned Linux on my resume.
- Explain virtual memory with respect to Linux. I explained about swap space in Linux.
- Why do we use virtual memory?
- Then he asked me to code this problem: Generate all Binary Strings of length N, I couldn’t code it completely, but he was satisfied with my approach.
- Do you know Databases? I said yes. What are database indexes?
- Which data structure is used to implement indexes? I said hash, he wasn’t satisfied, then I said arrays which was also wrong, finally he discussed with me about B+ trees and then I was able to explain to him about B and B+ Trees. He was satisfied.
- The time complexity of searching a tree.
- What are heap sort and its time complexity?
- Is there any sorting algorithm with the same time complexity as a heap sort?
- Is there any sorting algorithm with O(n) complexity?
Any questions for me?
I asked two:
- How would my work impact the larger picture?
- Any advice for me as a fresher?
Round 3(Technical interview 2):
- Tell me about yourself.
- What are your hobbies?
- Problem to find if an array contains any duplicates. Print 1 if it contains duplicates, else 0. He asked me to solve this in C, he didn’t want me to use maps in Java or Python. I proposed an O(n ^ 2) solution.
- How can you further optimize this? I said maps.
- How is HashMap implemented?
- What is a static variable?
- What are static functions?
- What are static variables inside a function?
I suffered a power cut at this point in time so the interview ended. However, I made it to the next round.
Round 4(Technical interview 3 + HR): How were the previous rounds? One thing that went well and one that didn’t.
- How comfortable are you with Linux?
- Which OS do you primarily use? I said Linux.
- Which flavor and version of Linux do you use?
- Asked me about a project on shell script which was mentioned on my resume.
- He was impressed with the fact that I mentioned Linux on my resume and had a shell script based project.
- Explain any one project to me. He was keen on seeing the entire working of the project.
- Are you confined to developer roles or open to all roles? I said I’m open to learning.
- Do you have any other offers at hand?
- Is this your first interview?
He explained to me about my team and my role.
We had some further discussion and the interview ended by 7:30 pm.
By 11 pm I received an offer letter from Oracle. A total of 8 students were selected.
Tips:
- Be confident in what you say.
- Keep calm even if the situation is not going well, you never know what the interviewer is thinking.
- Be thorough with your resume.