Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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17 stories

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OracleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Five Rounds from Top-K URLs to Log Collection

Screening Given a massive volume of URL access logs and limited memory, find the global Top K URLs and the Top K most frequently accessed URLs over the past 24 hours. The main focus was system-design thinking, trade-offs, and pseudocode implementation. Round 2 Given an event stream in the format (userId, eventType, timestamp), find the Top 100 users with the most events during the past hour. This…

Onsite0
OracleBackend EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Five Rounds From Elimination Screen to Behavioral

Elimination Round Given an array and an integer k, find the top k most frequently occurring elements. If two elements have the same frequency, the larger element comes first. Questions about Java collections, PriorityQueue, HashMap, and related knowledge points. Deep dive into projects mentioned in the resume. Round 1 Given a string, split it into exactly three non-empty palindromic substrings. N…

Onsite0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Six-Stage Onsite Loop from Brain Teasers to Bar Raiser

Stage 1 Coding Question Max profit using a single buy and sell (best time to buy and sell stock, limited to one transaction). Technical Question Bottom view of a binary tree — explain the implementation approach and the reasoning behind it. Technical Question Find the minimum number of processes allocated. System Design Given a series of webpage URLs (including schemaName, host, port), design a v…

Onsite0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Oracle Software Engineer interview: panel rounds and a quick offer

The process felt smooth and organized, and it did not start with technical questions. I first had a screening-style call where the team explained what to expect and set the context. After that, I moved to team interviews that focused more directly on what I could do. I completed two panel rounds, one technical and one behavioral, with questions aligned to the team's interests. The technical panel…

OfferTechnical Screen0
OracleSoftware EngineerIntern
Reported Jul 2026

Oracle Software Engineer interview: intern technical sequence

For a Software Developer Intern role, I went through an online assessment, three technical interviews, and an HR interview. The process felt positive and straightforward, and the panelists were friendly. They concentrated on problem solving, understanding my own projects, and core computer-science basics instead of trying to catch me with trick questions. The questions still required real fundame…

OfferOnline Assessment0
OracleAccount Executive
Reported Jul 2026

Oracle Account Executive interview: easy call, poor follow-through

One process began with a short recruiter conversation that felt easy and genuinely smooth. It lasted about 10 to 15 minutes, and I received positive feedback about the call, yet I was rejected afterward. A follow-up message after the call was never answered. In another run, the recruiter side broke down. The recruiter seemed careless and unprofessional, did not give useful detail about the role,…

RejectedHR Screen0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Oracle Software Engineer interview: LRU cache and course ordering

The technical rounds were more demanding than I expected. The questions did not seem unfair, but the interviewer energy and live problem-solving pace kept me switching gears. I implemented an LRU cache and then worked on a course-prerequisite ordering problem, which made me think about ordering constraints as well as code. The final round was the most stressful. I had to maximize the area trapped…

OfferOther0
OracleSoftware Engineer
May 2026

IC4 Rejection, IC3 Downgrade, and Relocation

Because the interview happened several months ago, I do not remember the exact timeline very clearly. Phone Screen Implement a service that supports: generate(token_id, time): create a token whose TTL expires at time. renew(token_id, time): refresh the token's TTL so that it expires at time. count(time): return the number of tokens that have not expired at time. BQ1: Tell me about a time when sim…

WithdrewOnsite0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Five Onsite Rounds and BQ Overload

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In progressOnsiteXP0
OracleApplied ScientistIntern
Feb 2026

Two Rounds, But Doubts About a Research-Only Role

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Technical ScreenXP0
OracleData ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

Two Rounds, a DFS Island Question, and a Research-Only Role

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Technical ScreenXP0
OracleData ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

Two Rounds, Then Doubts About an All-Research Role

Two rounds total, and the interviewers barely showed any expression the whole time. Two rounds total: the first was with someone pretty senior who asked me about a past project of mine, question-and-answer format, behavioral. The second round was coding plus introducing another one of my projects. They mainly work on conversational AI, and the questions didn't dig into specific technical details…

Technical Screen0
OracleData ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

Two Rounds and a Research-Only Role That Gave Me Pause

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Technical ScreenXP0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Nov 2025

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 shor…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

Same Question Rewritten Three Times in One Phone Screen

Documenting a bad phone interview experience. I don't know if this is typical for OCI, but here's my advice: if you can tell early on you're going to have a hard time communicating with the interviewer, just reschedule. The interviewer was some old guy, and his accent was incredibly, incredibly heavy. That said, there's nothing to be done about that in general — my own team has several people wit…

Technical Screen0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Trie Question, Five-Round Virtual Onsite, and an Unprofessional HR Twist

Phone screen (1 round): the interviewer ran the call (I remember his title was something like "senior engineer," though the way it was phrased sounded more like "elderly engineer"). He gave a trie + backtracking question. The prompt: the user types in a string prefix, and you return the 5 most similar existing words. You need to implement two APIs: a. add a word; b. search for a word. If fewer th…

OfferOnsite0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected Over a Forgotten Import

Phone screen: break a log into message, timestamp, and level, then query it based on time. Easy-medium difficulty. Round 1 was a bar raiser — pure behavioral questions, around ten of them, all pretty common. Round 2, I don't really remember the specifics of the interviewer, but it was also easy-medium. Round 3 (this is the round I got rejected in): given an array of numbers and a number k, each o…

RejectedOnsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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