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:

1. 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
2. Technical MCQ: Based on OS, DBMS(see Codd’s rule as well for this section), DSA, OOPs
3. 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.
4. 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):

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. He interrupted me and asked, how comfortable are you with Linux? Since I mentioned Linux on my resume.
3. Explain virtual memory with respect to Linux. I explained about swap space in Linux.
4. Why do we use virtual memory?
5. 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.
6. Do you know Databases? I said yes. What are database indexes?
7. 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.
8. The time complexity of searching a tree.
9. What are heap sort and its time complexity?
10. Is there any sorting algorithm with the same time complexity as a heap sort?
11. Is there any sorting algorithm with O(n) complexity?

Any questions for me?

I asked two:

1. How would my work impact the larger picture?
2. Any advice for me as a fresher?

Round 3(Technical interview 2):

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What are your hobbies?
3. 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.
4. How can you further optimize this? I said maps.
5. How is HashMap implemented?
6. What is a static variable?
7. What are static functions?
8. 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.

1. How comfortable are you with Linux?
2. Which OS do you primarily use? I said Linux.
3. Which flavor and version of Linux do you use?
4. Asked me about a project on shell script which was mentioned on my resume.
5. He was impressed with the fact that I mentioned Linux on my resume and had a shell script based project.
6. Explain any one project to me. He was keen on seeing the entire working of the project.
7. Are you confined to developer roles or open to all roles? I said I’m open to learning.
8. Do you have any other offers at hand?  
9. 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:

1. Be confident in what you say.
2. Keep calm even if the situation is not going well, you never know what the interviewer is thinking.
3. Be thorough with your resume.