[Reject] Oracle interview - MTS 2 - 1.5 years experience
Summary
I applied for the MTS 2 role at Oracle with 1.5 years of experience and was rejected after the first round, which involved extensive project discussion and a DSA question on anagrams.
Full Experience
I applied for the MTS 2 role at Oracle via their portal and received a callback after about 15-20 days, following numerous prior rejections. The recruiter explained the process, stating that the first round would be an eliminator, focusing on Data Structures and Algorithms, problem-solving, and a minor project discussion. I confirmed that Java or a similar language was acceptable.
My first round was with a principal engineer who had 11 years at Oracle. He immediately delved into a project discussion, grilling me intensely for 45 minutes on topics like Kubernetes, AWS, VPC, sidecar and init containers, microservices, connection protocols, and logging systems. He even challenged the architectural choices of my projects. In the remaining 10 minutes, he asked a simple DSA question: checking for anagrams, and insisted I use Java. Although I am familiar with Java, I hadn't practiced DSA extensively and struggled significantly. An unexpected electricity cut further compounded my panic, causing me to lose focus. After multiple trials and some assistance from hackerrank's autofill, I eventually completed the problem.
I was rejected straight off the bat!
Interview Questions (1)
Check if Two Strings are Anagrams
Given two strings, determine if they are anagrams of each other. Anagrams are words or phrases formed by rearranging the letters of another, typically using all the original letters exactly once.