Oracle Financial Services Global Business Unit Interview Experience 2022 August (On-Campus)

Last Updated : 18 Jul, 2023

Visited On-Campus a tier 2 NIT.

Dates:

August 18, 2022, Online Assessment (Thursday)
August 22, 2022, Online Interviews (Monday)

Two units of Oracle Visited the campus to recruit Full Time Employees. These units were:

Oracle Server Technology (ST) (For MTS Role)
Oracle Financial ServicesGlobal Business Unit (FSGBU) (For Associate Applications Developer role)

Round 1 (Online Assessment): This round was conducted on Hackerrank & consisted of 3 Coding Questions & 9 MCQs.

There 1 DSA-based intermediate-level coding question based on a mixture of prefix sum & sliding window which could be solved in any language of choice. I used C++ to solve it since my programming proficiency lies in C++.
The next coding question was based on Web Dev & was to be solved using pure JavaScript. It was a conditional question that had multiple conditions to be fulfilled in order to be fully solved. Since I used Python’s Django as my core backend framework for Web Dev, I was not really proficient in JS & hence I was not able to fully solve this question but was able to pass a few test cases based on logical understanding & manipulation.
The next coding question was SQL based & was again of intermediate level. There were certain conditions given & we needed to draft a query in order to fulfill those conditions & query the DB. I was able to successfully pass all the test cases for this problem.
Next, there were 11 hard MCQs based on Hashing, Time Complexity, Probability concepts & Computer Fundamentals. These MCQs carried important weightage & were the strong deciding factors for getting shortlisted. There was a negative marking on every incorrect answer so refrain from guessing if you are not really very sure about it. I attempted 10 out of 11 MCQs & I left a Hashing-based MCQ since I was not really sure about it. One of my friends attempted it & it turned out to be incorrect & hence he was not shortlisted. So, always play wisely & strategically.

Next Step: The results of this round were declared on 20th August (Saturday) & I was shortlisted for the FSGBU unit. A total of 34 candidates were shortlisted for Server Tech Unit & 26 for FSGBU. The shortlisting was done on the basis of how we attempted the online assessment & which questions we were able to successfully solve. Most of those who were able to attempt the JS question was shortlisted for the FSGBU unit but eventually, the distribution was also based on multiple deciding factors confined to the company.

So the big day was on August 22, 2022. We had a Pre-Placement talk for FSGBU & ST unit in the morning followed by the online interviews.
PPT for FSGBU was scheduled to be at 09:00 AM IST where their senior HRs & the hiring managers were present. They briefed us about the unit & what they primarily are involved in and all the different functionalities & the divisions of OFSS & its history. Above all, it was an informative PPT & useful for tackling questions in the HR Round. It is very important to pay attention to the PPT because later in HR rounds they ask you questions from PPT to test if you are an active listener or not.

Interview Round

Technical Round 1 of my interview was scheduled to be at 12:30 PM IST on Monday & the call was scheduled on Zoom Meetings. I joined the call on time & was put in a waiting room to wait for my interviewer. My interview started around 01:13 PM. I greeted the interviewer & then he greeted me back & then I introduced myself. I generally briefly speak about my current academic status (Sem & Major), my technical interests, my programming language proficiency & projects in my introduction & which seemed to have given him a good idea of my background.

He then started with HR questions to my surprise & asked 2 HR questions:

If I was asked to change my tech stack immediately according to the business requirements & if I can do this & be comfortable in the attempt. Always remember to answer such questions diplomatically & positively since you have to speak in favor of the firm & its interests. I explained to him how I will be able to adapt to a new tech stack & why it will not be an issue for me if the business requirements really need me to do so.
Next, he asked me the universally asked HR question, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years.” Now, this is a quite common question but the answer will differ from firm to firm and candidate to candidate. Again, you need to diplomatically answer this question showing your interest in professional growth & goals. I answered that I see myself at a leading or managerial position after at least 5 years & explained to him why I see myself there & how my future goals are aligned with my views on my five-year plan.
Again to my surprise, after asking these 2 questions he asked me to open an IDE of my choice & share my screen on Zoom. I was a bit shocked since I assumed that I was having my HR round before the technical round since one company followed the same process flow previously in this placement season. Now he got the technical DSA part & asked me these questions:

Design a bucket list system where there are two buckets & you need to segregate items:

Items in Bucket 1 that are not in Bucket 2.
Items in bucket 2 that are not in bucket 1.
Items common to Bucket 1 & Bucket 2

At first, this sounds like a complex question but it can be condensed down to a simple map-based approach problem. I was asked to give the logic of my approach & then code the same. I was thinking out loud as advised by my seniors. Discussing your approach with the interviewer is really very important to keep the interview interesting & alive. I discussed my map-based approach & then started coding the same on the IDE. As I wrote down the code, he interrupted me to ask why I was writing down that particular piece of code & the logic and approach behind it. I was a bit nervous & to contain every scenario & corner case I used 3 maps whereas only two were required. I also explained to him that only 2 maps are sufficient & I used the third one for testing & security purpose. I spent about 10-15 minutes discussing this question with him & then he asked me to copy the code & paste it into the chat box.

Then he moved to the next question, this was a linked list question & is really popular. The question was to add two linked lists that are representing two integers. I was confident & started explaining my approach. He then asked me to code. I was able to successfully code the solution & was also able to explain to him the corner cases & how to handle them. Since it was about to take an hour, he asked me to explain the rest of my approach and paste the code into the chat box. I was handling a few exceptions in the code but he said due to time constraints just explain the approach & paste how much you have written & that would be all.

The nature of interviewer was neutral in this round & he did not tell me if I was going wrong or correct but just asked about the time complexity between 1 line of code & my approach to writing that piece of code. He was more interested in my logic & approach.
The interviewer said that he was done asking questions & asked me if I had any questions for him. I asked him about his experience with programming languages & coding throughout his professional journey till now & he gets saturated using the same technology over the years. At this point, he was more interested & started explaining things about why he doesn’t gets saturated & what makes him keep going. So, this question of mine opened a good space for interaction between us.
Later he asked me to wait in the lobby where the HRs were present & were guiding the candidates. The HR put me into a waiting room where different candidates were coming & going. Some were getting fetched to their next round of interviews & some were asked to leave. I was really anxious during this period of time & I waited for about 45 mins in the waiting room. Many of my friends came in the waiting room & left. At last, I was the only one to be in the waiting room & I was afraid that I was not shortlisted for the next round. But then suddenly someone came to the waiting room & said Hi & asked me how was I doing. It was then I realized that this is an interview & I’d been promoted to round 2.

Technical Round 2

The interviewer greeted me & I greeted him back followed by my introduction. He then asked me about how my last round was & what all questions were asked in the last round & how was my experience in the last round. I explained to him what questions were asked & briefly explained to him how I approached them. He later moved on to ask me some OOPs concepts.
He asked me:
What is abstraction & encapsulation
Concept of virtual functions in OOPs (he first asked me about Virtual class but I corrected him about the virtual functions, although Virtual base class exists).
He then asked me for 1-2 more OOPs concepts.

Now he moved to the DSA-based questions & asked me 3 questions:

Question one was based on array manipulation & required simple logical thinking to tackle the problem, though I do not exactly remember the question it was not very difficult. He asked me about my approach & then shared his screen a gave me to access over Zoom to write the code on his notepad. I wrote down the code & he constantly kept supporting me throughout the time I was writing the code. At last, he asked about the time complexity & space complexity & what can be done to further optimize them. I answered that nothing could be done to further optimize the code since it was already in its highest optimized form. Then he moved to the next question.
He asked me if I knew about Binary Search Trees & what are its properties. After this brief explanation he asked me that given a binary search tree, you need to arrange the nodes in reverse ascending order or descending order. This was quite simple since I needed to just apply to reverse in-order traversal on the tree & the question was done. He was impressed by my quick response & then asked to optimize the time & space complexity. I optimized the code & he supported my approach throughout the time.
We were not left with much time during the last question so he asked quickly his last question. He actually wrote down elements of any array & then wrote a modified version of it & asked me to identify what changes he made. I quickly understood that it was multiplying all the elements of the array except itself. (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/a-product-array-puzzle/ )

I explained my approach and then he suddenly asked about another way to do it, I just asked for a minute to think and then he said no worries let’s conclude the interview since we’ve exceeded the time limit. I was developing the approach but time was up.

This interviewer was very supportive & guided me throughout all the questions, I felt like he was teaching the concepts but he was legit supportive. I also noticed while he was sharing his screen he had my resume, GitHub profile, GFG profile & LinkedIn open in his background, so he actually went through all my profiles. He later asked if I had any questions for him & since he sounded like a senior software engineer I asked him about his feedback about my interview & what I need to improve on. He advised me to go in-depth about the technical concepts that I study & always go for the root of any technical concepts & their functionality. After that, I thanked him & left the interview call room.

Now, I was again in the lobby where HRs were present I said to them that my interviewer has asked me to wait in the lobby. One of the female HR then took about a minute to check the status & then she said that my interviews for the day are done & I can leave the Zoom call now. I then thanked the HRs present in the lobby for giving me this opportunity & left the call.

Simultaneously, interviews for Server Tech Units were going on & my interview wrapped around 03:40 PM. Now I was just waiting for the result. Oracle is known to declare the results on the same day so yes you can understand the level of anxiety. I already went through the hiring patterns of Oracle on GFG archives & noticed that Oracle hires about ¼ of the final shortlisted candidates for the interview. Now 34 candidates have been shortlisted for Server Tech Unit & the results for ST came around 07:30 PM. 8 candidates were finally selected by the ST unit.
I was on a call with my two best friends in the college since 07:00 PM & the results of my unit were not out yet. I was becoming really very anxious but my friends on the call made sure that I was ok.
Later about 09:20 PM FSGBU sent the selection mail to the TPO. Since I was a Convener I had the privilege to see it before anyone else. I was able to see an MS sheet having just three rows filled. I somehow full of anxiety & mixed feelings opened that sheet & guess what? My name was at the top of that list.
I was selected as a final FTE for OFSGBU from NIT Raipur with 2 other selects from my branch. A total of 3 candidates were selected by FSGBU & later one waitlisted candidate was selected, so a total of 4.

Advice for the final year grads for the upcoming placement season 2023-24: