Profile
Status: New grad, MS in Information Systems from Top 50 CS school
Position: 2 years prior to Masters + 8 months internship
Month: August 2020
Company: Oracle OCI

Interview Prep

1. To practice coding I was consistently solving leetcode problems. I had solved close to 350 problems (mostly easy and mediums) for about 4 to 5 months. I want to stress that the numbers don't matter. I know people who are way smarter than me that have never even soled leetcode. Just make sure your basics on data structures are strong and solve leetcode problems till you feel confident enough to crack interviews. whenever i got an interview i tried to solve all medium questions in the last 6 months that were tagged under that company. Leetcode premium highly recommended.

2. To practice system design i purchased the system design interview feature with another platform. The course is very well structured. It goes about explaining all the concepts required to design a distributed system and has several examples of frequently asked system design questions. If you have good enough knowledge on distributed systems you may skip purchasing this course as there are several videos on youtube on system design. But if you are new to distributed systems or if you are like me who likes all the content organized and in one place, Definetly a good place to start.

Interview Process:

I first interviewed for Oracle in March 2020 but i was put on hold because of the hiring free due to the pandemic. later in August my former colleague referred me to a role in their team and i was allowed to interview. I was contacted by the HR and was asked to introduce myself, briefly explained about OCI and set up a meeting for my first interview.

Technical Phone Interview (Via CoderPad)
The technical phone interview was 45 mins long and was easy. They test you on basics of data sctructures and algorithms. It was straight forward and nothing fancy. The HR got back to me within 2 hrs of the interview and let me know that they wanted to move forward with the further rounds. I also received a call from the team manager explaining the kind of work that they do.

Virtual On-site Interview(Via Zoom)
The virtual on-site consisted of 6 rounds in total of 1hr each. 1 system design + 4 coding rounds + 1 Bartender (AKA Bar Raiser in some companies) all on the same day.

1. In the system design interview you may be asked a straight forward question like (design Twitter or design text auto complete of google) or you may be given custom requirements and asked to design the system. Make sure to clarify all the requirements and ask questions to clarify your doubts.

2. All the 4 coding rounds started off with behavioral questions and it goes on for like 15 mins followed by 45 mins of coding. For the coding round I had prepared by solved all medium questions tagged under Oracle from the past 1 year and all the questions that were asked to me were if not the same, a variant of them.

3. Finally in the bartender round, 2 interviewers from random teams with random job profiles joined the call. I feel the purpose of this round is not to check how good of a fit you are to the team that you are interviewing for but to just check your knowledge and your intellect. I was asked questions about my previous work experience and a few questions on public cloud for example, How would you explain public cloud services to a layman?

I want to end this interview experience by saying, If any of the interview experiences that you read helped you in getting a job, PLEASE make sure to share your interview experience and your interview preparations. By letting people know what they can expect, you can immensely reduce the stress and anxiety levels of job seekers.

Thank you!