On 24th July, 2024 we got to know that Oracle will visit our campus for placements. and the dates sent by them were 22nd Aug for the pre-placement talk, 23rd Aug for the Online Assessment (2Hours) and 27th Aug for the personal interviews.
The eligibility criteria was:
1. CGPA(avg of all six sems SGPAs) had to be more than 7.0 with no standing arrears.
2. Only candidates eligible to work in India
3. B. Tech/M. Tech / Dual with specialization in CSE/ECE/EEE/IT (CS/IT & Circuit branches)
The first round (OA) was supposed to be a race against time round, as I learned from my seniors. Last year it consisted of a REST API question, a coding question and a few mcqs based on DSA and aptitude. On 21st Aug, we got to know that there would be a delay and Oracle would be coming in after 7-10 days. On 6th Sept, we received the update that the OA will be held on 19th Sept, 2024. It was an online OA which could be taken from home but was proctored on Hackerrank. We got the paper pattern - 1 coding question, 15 aptitude questions and 20 DSA mcqs- all to be solved in 100 mins.
Round 1 - Technical OA
The coding question I received was K-Means Clustering in which data points were given representing a feature vector and we had to create k clusters.
Other coding questions my friends got were - Palindromic strings and element swapping.
There were 14 test cases to pass. My code passed all the test cases and I moved to the apti and mcq part. Apti consisted of 2 comprehension type questions and few grammar+logical reasoning questions.
MCQs consisted of questions related to DBMS, REST API, OS, code outputs etc.
This round was a test as to how fast you can apply your brain to a lot of things. Though the round was of 100 mins, there was no time limit for a particular section. You could move to any section anytime. The results of round 1 were out on 20th sept and my name was there on the list. Out of the 669 students who took the test, 38 people were selected. The interview was supposed to happen on 23rd Sept.
Round 2 was supposed to be held offline in college.
Round 2 - Technical Interview + HR
1st interview -
The interviewer was so welcoming that all my nervousness and stress eradicated almost immediately.
- He first asked me to introduce myself and from that he started asking me about my projects. I explained two of my projects in details and as I had hosted a project on AWS, we started talking about it and then he asked me about my Data Structure preference.
- Though I said Linked List, he gave me a question on Strings to code on paper. The question was pretty simple. I had to return the longest word in that string. Then he asked me a question on arrays.
- He asked me a coding question of longest subarray sum equals k too. (https://leetcode.com/problems/subarray-sum-equals-k/description/). I didn't have to properly code it, just my process and pseudocode worked.
- Having seen HTML and JS on my resume, the interviewer drew a form and asked me to code HTML on paper which I did and then asked me to connect it with JavaScript - more like using event listeners. He also asked the difference between == and === in js and he was pretty satisfied with all the answers I gave.
Key tip - Ask questions if you're not sure what the question is. Make sure what you are thinking is known to the interviewer so that you both are on the same page. I'm really grateful to my interviewer because he actually made the interview just like a light-hearted conversation.
2nd interview -
I was called for the second interview within 5 mins of my completion of the first.
- The interviewer started by asking me to introduce myself and then asked what what my biggest achievement in life that I was proud of.
- Then he specifically asked for the description of one of my projects. I explained everything in detail and then he saw I had used MySQL in that project so he gave me an SQL query to write where in the Employee table you need to display the count of the employees less than 24 years of age. I correctly wrote the query.
- After which he asked me to explain any join I am comfortable with. I explained left join with the help of two tables, wrote the query and drew the results on paper.
- We dived into Cloud then and he asked a lot of questions from there. After which he asked questions on waterfall model of SDLC and Agile. I didnt know about agile so i said so. He also asked me to explain my thought process of how I planned one of my projects to draw on paper.
- As my first language preference was Java, he asked me about whats so special about Java - whats not there in any language. The first thought would be OOPs but even C++ has it so no it was the part where a java program is converted from source code to byte code which makes it platform independent.
3rd interview -
This was the round where everything which wasn't asked in the previous rounds was asked.
- To get time to go through my resume, he asked me to introduce myself.
- He asked me an OS question where two processes are using the same resource but only after 1 process ends(but it needs the answer from the second process) the second will start, what is that situation called - deadlock. Continuing which he asked me another question which I could not answer.
- He gave me 2 linked list problems to hard code on paper. First was to find the middle element in the Linked List- I used the tortoise and hare method . Second one was intersection of two linked lists.
- After solving both of them, he asked me to explain my role in a project on my resume. I explained every detail of it- how I went about it, how I did every step. He went into the depth of it.
- He asked me to explain pillars of OOPs, some questions on DBMS - ACID properties. With this the interview got concluded.
There was also supposed to be a 4th round which was fully Managerial+HR but due to time constraints we didn't have that round. The results were directly declared after the 3rd round and I am lucky that I was one of the 6 people selected.
I would specially like to thank GeeksForGeeks as it DSA course assisted me, my seniors who helped me get through the process as well as my one constant who pushed me and motivated me whenever I was down and felt like I couldn't.