Oracle Software Engineer Interview Experience — Recruiter Ghosted Me Twice During Scheduling

I got referred to a role on the OCI observability org. About a week and a half later I got an HR call invite. The recruiter was extremely unprofessional — he ghosted me twice total, and I'll complain about it in chronological order below.

The first time the recruiter went dark was around scheduling the phone screen in late October. The system-generated interview availability window was a bit short, so I wanted to extend it. I emailed and CC'd both the recruiter and the coordinator, and neither of them replied to either of my two emails over three days. By about the fourth or fifth day I was about to just pick a time and ask for an extension afterward, when Oracle's automated email happened to add another person I could CC — so I pinged all three of them together, and only then did the recruiter say to have the coordinator extend my scheduling window for me. The interview system had originally matched me with an interviewer, but on the day of the interview I suddenly got an email saying the interviewer had a conflict and my interview was cancelled. I immediately CC'd everyone asking what happened and for reschedule details, and the coordinator told me they'd swapped me to another interviewer.

The new interviewer was a principal. He got straight to it and had me implement a cache — after going back and forth asking clarifying questions, I figured out he wanted the classic LRU cache, so I coded it live. After that there were some follow-up questions, going deeper into Java fundamentals trivia. The feedback at the time seemed decent.

Three days after the interview I got the exact same interview reminder email again, asking if I wanted to schedule it. This time the recruiter replied instantly telling me to just ignore it and not schedule anything — and after that he never replied to any of my emails again. A week later, and then two weeks later, I sent follow-up emails each time, and the recruiter just kept playing dead. Terrible experience.

Finally, after three weeks, my referrer told me the hiring manager's feedback was that the code was fine, but my answers to the follow-up questions weren't good enough, so I got rejected.