The first round was a telephonic interview with the hiring manager. They checked basic details and asked a couple of simple programming questions: reverse a string in-place and count character occurrences in a string.

The second round was another telephonic interview with a different manager. This interview focused on detailed questions about pointers in C and basic SQL.

The third round involved a candidate project using PHP and the Zend framework. This took a couple of weeks and can be challenging depending on your background.

I was then called for an in-house interview. There were four rounds of interview, featuring moderately difficult questions on design, linked lists, and other topics.

The final round was a telephonic interview with a director. This was purely non-technical, covering questions like your strengths and weaknesses, and why you want to work for Oracle.

The whole process took three months. I was then given a verbal offer, with the understanding that the approval process for a formal offer had to go through several levels of hierarchy and would take a couple of months.

No offer was in sight after four months. Upon inquiring, I was told it would happen in another month.

This reflects the bureaucratic nature of the organization.

Candidate project involving PHP, C++