Status: Experienced (Currently employed)
Position interviewing for: Senior software engineer at Oracle
Location: Various/Remote
Date: Oct, 2021

Cleared the preliminary screen

1. Problem was a BFS based solution to traverse a list of lists where each list indicates who their friends are. Result was to be a list of list of friends for each person - where some person may not have friends. Essentially the result should be level-1 list of friends, followed by a level-2 list of friends, etc., Result is a list of list of Strings. Completed in 20 minutes after 10 mins of preliminary chat. (Sorry - earlier misremembered this to be 2D array traversal)

Five rounds

1. The interviewer appeared disinterested and was more keen on talking about his prowess as SDE in test at Microsoft 15 years back and how he became a program manager. He lamented about how these days everyone memorizes solutions from leetcode and how he is so smart. He asked a lame supposedly OO question. When the answer was provided he kept changing the question to something different. Wanted to say that is called preparation - but he seemed to have an axe to grind and was blabbering about old days, like he was the decision maker - may be he was. Very condescending attitude. From my past experience, I have seen a few other types of these people at Oracle - who gave this vibe like - like this country belongs to us and who are you - type of feeling.
2. Question was bfs or dfs based question about reaching from top-left of matrix to bottom-right of matrix satisfying some condition. When provided a bfs based solution in less than 30 minutes with first 10 minutes dedicated to some experience based chit-chat, the interviewer asked if you could modify this to also provide the path. When I proposed a path, he was arguing about complexity and finally after wasting time, he said you can do it anyway and when I started on a dfs based solution, he had to hurry up and wanted to leave. Seemed like a disinterested interviewer. Somewhat condescending attitude.
3. By this time, I had no interest in the company or position, if I am going to work with these types of colleagues. Next was a system design question on designing a command line web based cloud interpreter to deploy to cloud - essentially a system that is like parsing, making backend calls to APIs - like an ARM-template parser, put it on a Q - get response and display results at scale. Discussion was interesting.
4. Some easy questions like is a string palindrome, recursion, grouping numbers with odd to left and even to right without sorting and few others. Did all of them easily.
5. By this time, I lost interest and could not get the first two experiences out of my mind. A behavioral round where I felt I had wasted my time.

NO offer. Interview gave me a view into possible colleagues and that way thanks - no thanks.