Cisco Interview Experience For SDE Summer Intern 2024

I received a link for registering for the Cisco Ideathon 2023 around June, but before an online assessment test had to be cleared. The test was to be done as a team of three. It contained three coding questions which I would rate as a Leetcode medium. One of those questions was pretty similar to Jump Game 1:Jump Game 1, you can check it out to assess the level yourself. We were given 1.5 hours for these three questions. My team was able to solve two questions and for the third one, we were able to pass a few test cases. This was however not enough and we were unable to qualify.

Pretty unexpectedly my team and a few more from the college got a mail from Cisco containing a link for another test as we had great scores in the previous one. We attempted the test. It consisted of a few objective-type questions that covered topics like operating systems, computer networks, and object-oriented programming. It also contained two coding questions which I would rate as Leetcode hard. We were able to solve all the objective-type questions and one of the coding questions. 7 people from my college were selected.

Our first interview was scheduled for 27th September 2023. We were asked to remake our resumes as they wanted them to be in a particular format. We were not supposed to write any personal information which included our names, college names, branch etc.

First Round

The entire process was online and we used Webex for the interviews. The first round was a technical round where I was asked questions about everything on my resume and some general questions. A little DSA was discussed and 1 question had to be coded on the spot. It was 2sum on Leetcode: Two Sum. It was fairly easy and I was able to do it. Then I was asked a few questions related to computer networks as it is a networking company. A few were asked related to operating systems, general aptitude and guestimate. The only odd question for me was related to web crawling as I had not mentioned it anywhere on my resume and never mentioned it during the interview. The interviewer asked if I was familiar with it and I said no so he gave me the definition and asked me to solve a problem based on that. I related it to graphs and answered accordingly and I guess he was satisfied with the answer.

We got the interview results later that evening and I made it through along with 5 more people from my college. About 70% of people overall cleared the first round.

Second Round

The second round was managerial. It was scheduled for 29th September 2023. This round is more or less based on your communication skills. I was asked a lot of questions about working in teams and giving some situations and how I have/ would tackle them. A few questions were asked about how I code and what kind of resources I have used so far. The questions were relatively simple and there is no particular way to prepare for this round, just be confident in yourself and try to remain calm.

Third Round

All 6 people(including me) from my college cleared the round. We had the HR round (ETR as they call it) the day. It barely lasted 10 minutes. We were just asked how the internship semester worked at our college, plans for higher studies and that sort of stuff.

Result

We got the results on 11th October 2023. Only 2(including me) out of the 6 people from my college were able to secure internship offers from Cisco.