Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

23 stories

Likes earn the author +10 XP for the first 3 likes each day

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.

Share your experience to earn XP