Oracle Interview Experience(Campus Placement – Application Engineer)

Round 1 (Online Test): It was conducted on their platform. 4 sections covered General Aptitude, English, Reasoning, basics of Coding in C++, and flow diagram of certain codes were given with some missing blocks, and we were to identify the missing blocks. There were a few questions on AVL Trees so revise it very well before the test.

They shortlist many students for the interview, so even if you haven’t given your best, there are chances that you may get shortlisted for the interview, so start preparing early, do not wait for the results to be declared.  

Round 2 (Technical Interview 1): This was the HR + Technical round for me. First, he gave his introduction and then asked me to give my introduction. After that, he told me to explain my project/s. So I explained one project which I did on the Graph Database.

Then he gave one coding question. In input, a matrix of size N*N was given. At each cell a character was present. Along with the matrix, a string was given. My task was to develop a function that takes matrix and string as input and return ‘True’ if that string is present in it, return ‘False’ otherwise. A string may be present in the row, column, or in any of the diagonal. (Basically, it was word finding game that we used to play in childhood)

Eg.

Input:
Matrix : [  X Y B A T
            C B T A T
            B A C B K
            K A X A L
            L Y T T Z ]
String: BAT
Output: True (BAT is present in the given matrix)

Round 3 (Technical Interview 2): This was the shortest round for me. He gave me one coding problem. In input, an N*M/ N*N  matrix was given. We have to traverse and print elements of the matrix in the staircase pattern i.e. first right, then the bottom, then again right, and so on. You can not visit one element more than once. Once you reach the last element of the matrix traverse back to the 1st column and then to the first row. This won’t be possible in the N*M matrix. I had to write one function which takes care of all 3 possibilities.  

Consider the following 3 different scenarios :

1. N > M:

   Input : 1 2 3 4
           5 6 7 8
           9 10 11 12
   Output : 1 2 6 7 11 12.  

   Explanation: 

   1 → 2
   ↓
   6 → 7
       ↓
       11 → 12

2. N < M:

   Input: 1 2 3
          4 5 6
          7 8 9
          10 11 12
   Output: 1 2 5 6 9

   Explanation: 

   1 → 2
   ↓
   5 → 6  
       ↓
       9

3. N = M:

   Input : 1  2  3  4
           5  6  7  8
           9 10 11 12
           13 14 15 16
   Output: 1 2 6 7 11 12 16 15 14 13 9 5  

   Explanation: 

       1 → 2
           ↓
       5   6 → 7
       ↑       ↓
       9       11 → 12
       ↑             ↓
       13 ← 14←15 ← 16

I used a variable to keep track of the direction i.e. right and bottom. He asked me whether I can do this without using that variable. After thinking for a while I was able to do that.  

Round 3 (Technical + HR) The interviewer gave me a puzzle of the magic square. In that few values were missing. First I had to fill those values. Once I did that, he told me to write code for the same logic which I used for solving the problem. I wrote the code and explained it. Then he asked me the following questions:

What are my career goals?

Whether I am ok with Gandhinagar or not? Why I don’t want to go to Bangalore and Hyderabad?

Final Result: Total 6 students were selected, I was one of them.

I suggest that if you have enough time for preparation then go through all archive questions of Oracle from GeeksforGeeks and solve some famous puzzles.