Oracle Interview Experience (Server Technology) | On-Campus 2020 (Virtual)

Oracle visited our college for two profiles: Server Technology and Application Engineer. First round was an online test followed by 3 to 4 rounds of interviews.

Round 1: The whole test was divided into 4 sections.

1. Aptitude:  Mathematics, Reasoning, Observational, Flowchart (a flowchart for a purpose was given with missing pieces you had to complete those missing pieces).

2. Coding Output Based: Questions were based on predicting output of the given code snippet (Focus on AVL trees and Threaded Binary Trees). Some complexity based questions. Also questions on Radix Sort were there.

3. Core Subjects: Fundamentals in OS, DBMS and OOPS.

4. English Comprehension: Passage based questions, grammar based questions, ordering the sentences in a meaningful order, best synonym substitution based questions.

Around 80 students were shortlisted for the interviews including both the profiles with the 20 students in waiting list. Interviews were held over Zoom. Following is from Server Technology:

Round 2 (1st Technical): 

Interview started with interviewer’s introduction followed by my introduction and then I was immediately asked to code for missing number in an array of 1 to n numbers. After I did it, he asked me how would I approach a new problem. Then he asked me my favorite Data Structure which followed a brief discussion on Linked Lists, Stacks and Queues (like what are their practical applications). Then he asked me to tell him about my project and what kind of database I used in project and why did I use only that database. Then he asked me about ACID properties in DBMS. Finally he asked me, if I had any queries.

Round 3 (2nd Technical): 

Interview started with interviewer’s introduction, after which he asked me to code for ‘Nth largest and Nth smallest element in unsorted array of distinct elements’. A tip: always start with basic approach. I told him I’ll be using sorting and since he was not comfortable with me using stl, he asked me to implement quick sort and then solve the question. I did so and was not asked to optimize it but in most of the cases, interviewer would definitely ask you to. Then he asked me how would I debug a code followed by my approach to a software development problem statement. Later he asked about my area of interest, since it was OS and DBMS, he asked me about a process, thread and its types and can a thread be associated with two different processes? Then we had a discussion over the databases I’ve used in the past which followed question about join, types of join and is a foreign key necessary for join? And after answering all the questions, he asked me if I had any questions for him.

Round 4 (3rd Technical): 

This round was quite different from others. He gave me his introduction, asked about my interests and what could had been better in the past rounds. He then asked me about different real life problems related to the company and hosted servers. 

Examples – What will you do if your database is destroyed in an earthquake? How will you prevent loss of data in case of loss of a server? What if a user is encountering a bug while using your product? How will you handle the situation? How will you debug it?

He then asked me about my strengths and weakness followed by questions on the same and how I’ll deal with my weakness in real life scenarios. Then, he asked me if I have any questions for him.

Round 5 (HR) : 

This was quite a chill round. He asked me about my interview rounds, was I satisfied with my performance? He then asked me, supposedly, if I don’t get this job then, what would be my next move or what companies do I have in mind followed by questioning how I prepared for the interviews and online rounds. Finally, he asked me if I have anything to say to him, to which I complemented Oracle’s online round as it was real fun.

After few hours, we got the results. Verdict: Selected.

Tips: 

Be calm and think before answering. Don’t be shy to ask questions. Think logically and rationally for all the questions. Not everything can be learnt through books or articles, for some things, you just have to be logical. I observed in this interview process that Interviewers don’t always want the correct solution to the question, they just want to see how you approach the problem. For preparation, I’ll say, use GeeksForGeeks and GateSmashers on Youtube for technical/theory part, Leetcode for coding practice and IndiaBrix for aptitude.