Oracle on campus interview Experience-Life lesson-2024

Hey this is me sharing my on campus oracle interview experience and the key-takeaways . I cleared the OA on alongside roughly 42 students. We had ppt presentation from senior director oracle and others. There were 3 rounds all technical.

ROUND 1:

The interviewer was friendly in round 1. He asked me to introduce myself and then explain my projects and my role in them. My resume structure didn't impress him, but I explained it verbally, and he was okay with that. Then he asked me about Linux and to write 10 commands used in Linux. Next, he asked questions about Git, including git merge, git cherry-pick, and git rebase, and what to do when a merge conflict occurs. I answered them in detail, although I didn't know the use case for the cherry-pick command at the time; I learned about it right after the interview. He also asked about SDLC architecture and AWS services like EC2, S3, and Lambda. Then he asked me to write and explain the code for insertion, deletion, and search operations in a linked list, which I completed, Then he asked me what if i want to delete and element from the middle of the stack? Give me an inconsistent approach . I said if you know the size of the stack ,pop the elements and store it in an array skipping the middle element and then reverse the array to push back into stack so that you can maintain the relative order. Round one ended there. I asked for feedback, and he said, "All I'll say is you are a good communicator; the rest you'll know after lunch (about R2)."

Round 2:

I was the last candidate waiting for R2. R3 was just an interaction with the senior director, so R2 was the deciding round. Four candidates cleared both R2 and R3, and everyone else was either rejected in R1 or R2. When it was my turn, I went in, and the interviewer asked me for an introduction. I fumbled a bit, but he didn’t call me out on it. He then asked me to explain my projects, which I did, although the focus of the round wasn’t on projects.

Next, he asked, "Do you know Java?" I replied that my primary language is C++, and I’ve extended my learning to C#. He then asked about backend system deployment. I hadn’t worked on backend before, but I answered as best I could, mentioning testing, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and tools like Grafana and Prometheus (with some prompting from him). However, I could tell my answers weren’t as detailed as he wanted.

To compensate, I mentioned my knowledge of AWS concepts, but he wasn’t interested in diving into that. He then gave me a puzzle, a mathematical one, which I solved within a minute. Afterward, he asked a DSA question involving strings, which I wrote down. Finally, he asked, "If I have two numbers and I want to perform division without using * or /, only + and - are allowed, how would you do it?" I thought for a minute and proposed that we could repeatedly subtract until the result is less than the divisor, which would give the remainder, while maintaining a count for the quotient. He agreed that it would work.

But then came the moment I’ll never forget—a harsh lesson. He asked me to write two nested SQL queries, and I completely messed up both. He rejected my answers but still wanted to give me another chance, asking, "Do you know REST APIs?" I admitted I had never worked with them. He paused for a while and then ended the interview, taking my feedback inside.

After waiting for 15 minutes, I saw all the panelists packing up, and the R3 panelist left the room. That’s when I realized my journey was over, and I wasn’t progressing to R3. The Oracle team later announced the selected candidates and encouraged the rest of us not to give up.

Looking back, I knew Oracle is a database company, and I knew from seniors that they had asked about REST APIs last year. But I spent all my time practicing DSA and previous years' questions. I was so close to getting selected, but it wasn’t enough. I’ve learned a tough lesson: while DSA is important, core subjects matter too. I won’t make that mistake again.