Oracle came to our campus for hiring.

Round 1: Programming & Aptitude, Logical MCQ Questions.

Round 2: Two programming questions were asked.

Next, there were two technical interview rounds.

Finally, an HR round was held, but not for all students.

Round 1: MCQ questions divided into 4 parts – Verbal, Aptitude, Computer Science and Aptitude, Programming Knowledge.

Computer Science and Aptitude: Questions on C, C++, DBMS, OS, and Software Development. The key point was managing time.

Programming Knowledge: The following types of questions were asked:

• Given a program (BST, AVL tree, and other trees), answer questions based on the code (one program yielded 3-5 questions).
• Given a Flow Chart diagram, answer questions based on it.
• Basic questions on time complexity, stack, queue, linked list, and array.

Round 2: Two programming questions were asked (Time: 1 hour).

Question #1: Given two times in 24-hour format, a start and an end time, determine how many times each digit (0-9) repeats as time progresses from the start time to the end time. (Refer to the input test case for clarity).

Input: 23 00 00 23 00 01

Output: 7 1 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0

(The number of times '0' repeats is 7, and so on…)

Question #2: Given a directed graph, find the number of cycles whose length is equal to the length of the longest cycle in the graph.

Technical Interview 1:

• Introduce yourself.
• The interviewer asked me to implement a calculator that operates similarly to a Windows/Android calculator. (To provide complete clarity, the interviewer demonstrated the calculator's functionality on their mobile phone).
• I was then asked to write pseudocode for a problem: finding an object in a given maze. Essentially, I needed to determine if the object could be found from the starting position, optimizing the code to avoid re-traversing paths where the object was not found.
• After writing the pseudocode, I was asked to write the complete, working code, handling corner cases. Finally, we discussed why I chose a vector over a list. The interviewer was impressed with my solution and data structure choice.

Technical Interview 2:

• Introduce yourself.
• The interviewer noted, "There is no Java on your resume, why so?" and then asked for points on why C is better than Java. (I was able to provide two valid points).
• What happens when a URL is typed into Chrome and Enter is pressed. (I gave a convincing answer).
• What problems are encountered when booking a Tatkal ticket, and how would you tackle the issue when the website becomes overloaded? (I was able to relate this to basic OS concepts).
• Given an equilateral triangle with an ant at each vertex. Each ant moves only on the lines connecting vertices and at the same speed. What is the probability that any two ants meet? (I solved this, but it took time).
• Given X squares of 1x1 dimension, can you place them on a plane to form a larger square? If so, write a program to verify this for any input X. (I was able to suggest two approaches: using built-in functions and using prime factors).
• You need to write code to find the first number N that has X factors. (I was able to describe a brute-force method and a prime factorization method; the interviewer was impressed with my second approach).
• Given a database definition, normalize it. (I had not encountered problems like this before, so I was unable to solve it).
• Define meta-log and schema.
• Finally, the interviewer asked the classic 2 egg and 100 floors question.

Finally, I would like to state that competitive programming significantly helped me in cracking the interview. I would like to thank CodeChef, SPOJ, and GeeksforGeeks for it.