Cisco recently visited my campus for 3 roles -:
- Software Engineer
- Data Engineer
- Site Reliability Engineer
(Eligible branches were CSE and ISE only with a Minimum 8.0 CGPA)
Round 1:Technical Quiz: 25 multiple-choice questions + 1 Coding Question, which were divided into 4 sections. Duration: 1 hr
- Aptitude – Easy if practiced from https://www.indiabix.com/
- Computer Science Core – Code snippets (C programming ), Data structure, and Algorithm (mainly array, string, linked list, and trees)
- Electronics Core – CSE, ISE students found this section a bit difficult (mainly logic gates, FET, thermal runaway, voltage-current characteristics of diode)
- Networking – Knowledge taught in college is sufficient. – EASY
The Coding question was:
Mail Rooms for Office Buildings. Problem – Company ABC has a cooperative campus with multiple buildings these buildings may or may not be connected to one another. please help alica to determine the minimum number of mail rooms to be set up so that all buildings are serviced with the following considerations.
- A building can host only 1 mail room.
- A building having a mail room will also service buildings directly connected to it. Hence those directly connected buildings may not host a mail room unless required otherwise.
- A building may or may not be connected to other buildings. In such a case it would need its own mail room.
Technical knowledge required to solve this question – Dynamic Programming, Graphs, Dp on Trees.
I would advise you to solve Codeforces (1700-1800 rating) problem on Codeforces from dynamic programming and graphs.
37 students were selected after the first round.
Round 2: Technical Interview (30 – 60 mins): The Technical interview started at 8:30 am the next day. This round has two interviewers first they will start with asking DSA and then later will move to DBMS and SQL and questions from Computer Networks were also asked.
Some of the questions were -:
- Problems related to binary search, Doubly Linked List.
- Level order traversal in trees and a follow-up question, Zig Zag traversal in Graphs.
- From DBMS question was related to ACID Properties. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/acid-properties-in-dbms/amp/ Follow-up question was how did you implement ACID properties in your project. (As I had a DBMS project).
- I was told to write SQL Query for a problem.
- What are the OSI layers and explain them.https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/layers-of-osi-model/
Round 3:Technical + Managerial Round (30 – 50 mins): This round also had two interviewers, I was told to explain my projects. Then the interviewer asked me questions related to my projects like how I approached the idea and what are the tech stacks.
- What is Vue?
- What is virtual DOM and how is it beneficial?
- Explain the TCP/IP protocol.
Some basic managerial questions like -:
- tell me about yourself.
- why cisco?
- what do you know about cisco?
- what is the role you’re interested in?
- what are your hobbies?
- what is the one thing which college taught you?
- what is the one thing which your past internship taught you?
- what is one good thing about your college?
- what are your future plans?
- Do you have any questions for us?
Round 4) HR Round (15-20 mins): My HR round started at 5:30 pm. The HR asked some basic questions like -:
- Tell me about yourself.
- What are your future plans?
- Describe yourself in one word
- What is the 1 thing that you want to improve in yourself?
- Do you have any Location constraints?
- What are your big achievements professionally & personally?
- Do you have any questions?
Finally, 11 people were selected comprising 7 software engineer roles, 3 data engineers, and 1 site reliability engineer.
I was selected for Software Engineer Role.
Final Tips:
- Make sure you know every small detail about your project because you will be asked to explain all your projects in both rounds 2 and 3.
- Keep something to eat with you as the recruitment process started at 8:30 in the morning and went till 6:30 in the evening.
- Make sure you give concise and clear answers in the HR round.
- Practice some puzzles as those were asked from my friends.
- Be confident, Keep a smile.
You’ll Ace it!! Best of Luck!