Status: New grad with 1 year of prior Experience, MS in CS from Mid-Tier US university
Position: SDE - LC2 at Oracle - OCI
Location: Santa Clara, CA
Date: Feb 3, 2020

How did I get the interview call?
I had contacted few managers and directors in LinkedIn and one of the director contacted me back and assigned me to a hiring manager.

Two weeks after that a hiring manager from Oracle OCI - File Storage Service team in Santa Clara contacted me, and asked me to schedule a 30mins call with him to discuss about my prior experince, skills and projects.

Telephonic Call with the Hiring Manager (30mins):
As I told above he went through my resume, and asked couple of questions about my experience, projects that I had done during my Masters. And he thoroughly explained what his team is working on, and what my contribution to the team and what is expected from me.

A week after talking with the hiring manager, a recruiter contacted me to schedule a telephonic screening.

Telephonic screening with a Team Member (1 hour):

• He asked couple of questions about OOP Principles (what is Inheritence, Polimorphism etc. )
• Couple of questions on Python lists.
• And asked me to implement any in-place sorting algorithm.

The interview went on for only 40 mins, after that he told he has no more questions to ask, and let me ask couple of questions.

Two days after this I received a mail from recruiter with an invite for the onsite interview. Gave myself 2 weeks of time for preperation and scheduled it on Feb 3.

Onsite (5 rounds) :

• Round 1 (Bartender interview, 1 hour) :

  • Asked me to explain about any one project that I had done during my Masters and asked lots of follow up questions on that.
  • Asked me to implement Unix Grep command in C++ or Java.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep)
  • Asked couple of questions about OCI Values.

• Round 2 (System Design, 1 hour) :

  • Design Whatsapp like messaging app. He mainly asked me to explain about one-to-one messaging, sent, delivered and read marks, Push Notification, and how I will handle image and video shares.

• Round 3 (Lunch Interview with Hiring Manager, 1.5 hour) :

  • He let me ask questions most of the time, and asked me couple of behavioral questions like how do you handle conflicts with manager. Are you a team player, and explain an instance where you had a conflict with a team member and how did you resolve it.

• Round 4 (OO Design, 1 hour) :

  • Implement Futoshiki puzzle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futoshiki)
  • Mainly concentrated on how I design classes, and code implementation to verify the puzzle for its correctness.

• Round 5 (Coding, 1 hour) :

  • Initally lots of questions about OCI values.
  • Coding Problem - K closest point to origin (https://leetcode.com/problems/k-closest-points-to-origin/)

My thoughts:

• Concentrate mainly on System Design and OO Design. I had referred Grokking the System Design Interview and Grokking the Object Oriented Design Interview from educative.io. And also Cracking the Coding Interview also has good set of problems on these topics.
• For coding do Oracle tagged questions in Leetcode.
• And keep on talking to the interviewer when you are stuck, they will help you out. This is the mistake I made.

Its been 8 months since my graduation and I am still stuggling to get a job. And this is my 5th on-site rejection. I have never been this depressed and hoping something will work out.

Any suggestions on how I can improve is appreciated.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better