CISCO | Interview Experience | SDE For Cloud Applications | 6 Month Internship + FTE | On Campus

Interview Experience

Hello people, I recently started my 6 Months Spring Internship at Cisco (Bengaluru Office).

The placement season in my college had begun in August and Cisco had come around the last week of August. The Role they offered was cloud application developer. The offer was for both the 6 months internship (Jan – June) and a Full time employment.

Cisco didn’t keep any kind of cutoff based on CGPA or branch, so almost all the students were allowed to take the Online Assessment round(even the M.tech students). The entire interview process was online and conducted on Cisco’s Webex platform. It was very smooth and hassle-free. Now let’s go through the interview process.

Interview Process

Round 0 (Online Assessment) : This round included a HackerRank exam. It consisted of 41 MCQs and 1 coding question. The total time allotted were 60mins. The MCQs consisted questions from various topics like networking, operating systems, Mental Ability(Very Important. Do practice the questions of Mental Ability) and computer architecture. The coding question was a medium graph problem. Simple use of BFS was enough. This round was done on-campus, in college computer labs.

After the OA, 25(20 Btech + 5 Mtech) students were selected for the further interview rounds.

Round 1 (DSA + Computer Fundamentals) : This was the first technical round. The interviewer was super sweet and made me comfortable. He then put forth a DSA question. At first, I wasn’t thinking in the right direction but after discussing some more examples from my side, I got a very clear idea of how to solve the question. The interviewer was very patient and kind to clarify the smallest doubts that I had. After understanding the question, I was asked to share the screen and code the solution on VS Code. It was more like peer-programming. If I was thinking in the wrong direction, the interview would drop subtle hints and lucky me, I could grab those hints and get back on the right path. After coding the solution, he provided me some test cases from his side to check the correctness of the code and it passed them all. The DSA question was a string question, in which I had to use queue and a hashmap. The interviewer then asked me some basic questions on OOPs and went in detail about polymorphism. Pro tip : Please Think out loud !!! Speak out your approach.

It was a spot elimination round, if we couldn’t get through this round the HR would notify us.

Round 2 (Resume Projects + Managerial) : This round was less intense than the previous round. Here too, the interviewer was calm and patient. He asked me about my projects mentioned in the resume. I had one project which used terraform as IaaC to provision the resources on AWS(luckily it was one of the role requirements). So the interviewer asked me to share my screen and asked questions of the code I mentioned in this project. We majorly discussed about terraform and a little about other cloud concepts. He asked me questions on MongoDB internals and asked me very basic concepts of sharding. He asked me some managerial questions too. He seemed to be very satisfied with my answers.

Round 3 (HR) : This was the last round. The HR explained me about the compensation and some of the offer details. He asked me some questions about the company and the role.

Results were announced, 4 out of the 25 candidates were selected for role and I was one of them.

All in all, I would just like to tell to focus on both DSA and Development. It’s never DSA vs Dev, its DSA && Dev. Practice DSA regularly. Know how to deal with the placement pressure, talk to your parents, find your friend group and give it your best shot. Remember that even luck counts. So just keep working hard !!! You got this.