Oracle Interview Experience

Interview Round 1: 

• Difference between multiprocessing and multithreading.
• SQL Query to find the nth highest salary in the employee table. I wrote one using nested queries. But he asked me to write a generic one which I didn’t know and I simply told him that I’m not good at writing SQL queries.
• A simple math problem: A horse travels one mile in two minutes in one direction. It travels same distance in three minutes in opposite direction due to wind. Find the time taken to travel one mile when there is no wind.
• Write the code to find the height of the Binary tree (I was coding in python but he specifically asked me to code in C which I did but missed a lot of semicolons >_< which he specifically pointed out and asked me to complete those).
• What are your weaknesses?
• What are your strengths?
• Why should we hire you?

Interview Round 2:

• Describe your internship project. I used docker as an internship so I was asked questions about containers, virtual machines, etc.
• Describe one of the projects you have mentioned in your resume. No cross-questioning.
• I was asked a coding question that I don’t remember. It was easy.
• I was asked to write code for finding the longest palindromic substring in a string. First, he asked about the approach, and then I coded it using the brute force approach. I was asked to optimize it, then I explained to him the approach and coded the optimized approach.

Interview Round 3: This round was taken by the Director of Development. He took our pre-placement talk too.

• I was surprised when he told me that I have got the feedback that you are very good at problem-solving (This was his starting line and tbh I have never done any kind of competitive programming, I don’t even have CodeChef, code forces, interview bit profiles and made a leetcode profile after the start of placement season). He asked if I solve problems on leetcode and I told him that I’ve solved 30-35 problems only. 
• He asked me about programming language preference and I told python. Then he told me he hasn’t used python much and then asked me about shallow copy and deep copy in python. I was asked to show it using code.
• Then I was asked a two-sum problem where we had to print all the pairs summing up to a given number. First I gave a brute force approach using two loops and then optimized it using a HashSet. I gave a two-pass solution first and then he asked me to do it in one pass, which I did.
• Then he asked me: Find the minimum number of deletions to make a string palindrome. A simple dynamic programming problem. So I directly coded it using dynamic programming without going into the brute force approach.
• Everything was going well till now but now started the difficult phase. He said that I’m too one-dimensional and I’m not open to new ideas (because I was doing everything in python). I explained to him that when we started having ML subjects in the 5th-semester python became a necessity and since then I got used to it and started using python for literally everything. Then he started explaining how python is still considered a scripting language and not a programming language. He said that I will not be able to work in java. Then I told him that we used to work in Java but it’s only in the past year I’m using python. Then he started asking questions about it which I hardly answered. Questions were:
• Difference between string buffer and string builder.
• What is the use of “String [] args” as a parameter to the main function in java. (I answered only this question).
• Will the program run if we write only “main()” instead of “main(String [] args)”?
• Will the program run if we write “Main(String [] args)” instead of “main(String [] args)”?

Then he asked me to convince him that I would be able to work in java if selected. Which I hardly managed by saying that like I have adapted to python, I can go back to java again. It’s all about adaptation. To which he replied, then a rag picker can also adapt why have I come for hiring in IIITA? I had no answer to this. After this, he asked me if I have any questions because for the last 40 minutes, he was the only one asking questions and he would like to answer my questions too. I asked him about the values of the company. I also told him that it was a surprise to see him as the interviewer because I didn’t expect him to be the director after taking the pre-placement talk to take interviews too. Then he asked me about the interview experience and after that, I was asked to leave the call.
For others, it was purely HR round where they were asked about college life, school life, childhood, family members, etc.
The results were declared late at night and I was among the selects.