Here at our Development Center in Guadalajara, Mexico, we want you to succeed in your interview with us. As a lot of our interviewers see the interview process as an art, your approach to the interview as such can help you a lot.
The following are some tips for your interview with Oracle, and can often make the difference between success and failure:
Time
Make sure to be on time for the interview. We try to run a very tight schedule, and if you are late this may then delay all others. Our interviews can last up to 3 hours, so please be ready to spend at least that time with us. Plan appropriately with your school, current work, etc. Also, if you can not attend please notify us via email or phone as soon as possible.
Interests
If you have strong preferences in layers of development or certain projects, please let us know. We have lots of openings across the stack. Be open to hearing about the area that an interviewer might have for you and trying to find areas of common interest in that project.
Data Structure and Algorithms
We are not solving easy problems at Oracle, but inventing new ways of manipulating data that require very strong knowledge of core Computer Science areas. How else can you design and scale out a thousand nodes cluster or a new method of manipulating an exabyte of data?
If you are interviewing for a development or QA position, we recommend that you review your class or outside studies on algorithms including recursion, sorting methods, loops, pointers and various data structures for manipulating and managing data.
If you come from a non-CS background or are rusty, read as much as you can in this area ahead of time. For us this is critical, and unfortunately sometimes the area of greatest difficulty for otherwise great programmers.
Programming Languages
For most of our interviews pseudo-code is fine. We are most interested to see if you can solve a problem vs being a human compiler and syntax machine. But at some point, we will grill you on the programming language most applicable to the area you wish to develop or join.
The Oracle database and all low level components is build in C or C++, our management suite is build in Java, and our tests are automated either using Perl or Python. Our interest is to see how much you really dominate this language, its tricky areas, and how do you avoid common errors.
English
Our interviews are in English. We need to see if you are able to hold a strong technical discussion with your future team members from all other parts of the world. It does not need to be perfect, but we need you to be able to communicate.
Presentation
You don't need to wear a suit or a tie. Feel free to dress in any attire that makes you comfortable. Do bring 3 hard copy of your resume even if you applied online. This makes it easier for the interviewer to ask you questions about your background.
Attitude
Don't be shy or cocky. We like people who ask lots of questions, are dynamic, can come up with lots of different ideas quickly, and interview us as much as we interview them. We prefer if you tell us you don't know something, but then try to guess or figure out some possible answers vs being sure of yourself on a wrong answer. Be polite with the interviewer during the whole interview. At the end, feel free to ask for feedback.